Study: comparing free and proprietary network stacks

Study: comparing free and proprietary network stacks

Judging from the text of the PR, they are not comparing the stacks' behavior against the RFCs; they are just analyzing the code itself, and detecting such mistakes as using values of uninitialized variables. The defects they find are real, even when they don't necessarily result in noticeable bugs; any small change to the code might change that too. One problem with this process is that it produces false positives, which take engineering attention to winnow out.

Probably a big part of the reason Linux comes out ahead here is that a similar process is already being applied to Linux code by those lunatics at Stanford. One benefit to being important Free Software is that it becomes practical and worthwhile to apply this kind of attention, for graduate credit. Linux really is a part of the academic literature, and benefits correspondingly from the academic attention. (BSD, too, of course, and for much longer.)