Standford University research team has found that Linux has fewer bugs than the competition using Coverity, a static source code analysis tool. Andrew Morton, one of the core developers says that the major bugs detected using this tool have already been fixed. It might be of interest that Linus Trovalds has developed a similar tool called sparse specifically for the Linux kernel which has proved itself to be pretty useful.
Anonymous (IP: 61.95.184.—) made the following, hilarious post:
“This is totally false, as no such comparison exists. Notice the way this guy has put it though, in order to make his own statements more difficult to prove for what they are – i.e., FUD. ”
perhaps you can actually go ahead and google but since you wont let me spoonfeed you.
http://lwn.net/Articles/115530/
read the site details and comments
For the record:
Whoever might be remotely interested, please try the link yourself. The link points at this same article, and *no* mention of BSD.
In the *comments*, on the other hand, lies the “source” of our FUD-spreading GNU/Linux advocate.
And what might it be? Of course: a *comment* by another *anonymous* fellow (!) stating oh so authoritatively:
“Someone did a comparison and BSD was far worse.”
And of course, no links to support the claim.
*This* is the source!
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the wonderful world of GNU/Linux advocacy.
*cough* Use BSD..
“http://www.coverity.com/forms/login.php?continue=trialthankyou.html…
You think I am lying. Ok. go ahead and download the above product and see how freebsd fairs against Linux.
remember though that this isnt something against bsd because coverity when it was previously called standford checker has been posting the results of their checks for around 4 years in a periodic basis and Linux kernel has been improved from their analysis while bsd development team hasnt had such a oppurtunity
even when their efforts where being appreciated Linus needed a free tool for the job and created sparse…
so its not fud at all
“Dude, are you serious with your response? Did you even take it into context? Did you even read the entire response”
That’s pretty much what I was going to ask you. These guys did a 4 year study, you formed a 3 minute opinion. You’re sure they’re wrong, and you’re right. You think this is reasonable? So we can just announce, “Slash proclaims Stanford University idiots”. Maybe it takes one to know one.
By reading the article carefully, it seems that what Stanford made is just an analysis of the Linux kernel, *not* a comparison.
The comparison comes from ther Wired journalist.
Am I wrong?
”
The comparison comes from ther Wired journalist.
Am I wrong? ”
exactly. I am very thankful that you got the real deal
“And what is actually out there? NOTHING. ”
there exists many details on the relevant studies but since you are too scared to google I will leave that out. download the product.do the study yourself and see the results
“Leave BSD alone.”
People make such comparisons all the time. all code is politics. static code analysis such as coverity has helped in the development of Linux and will help bsd too if you keep your minds open.
if you dont want to use coverity then use the gpl’ed sparse. its pretty much useful. I repeat that I wasnt trashing bsd or anything else. merely pointing out that it has been a useful too.
freebsd throwed out more potential bugs with these tool because it wasnt refined with coverity unlike linux. the same things can be achived with freebsd or even windows. MS does something pretty similar too for your information
Am I wrong?
Thats my impression as well. Besides, Rayner made a few insightful comments where he argues its about code quality and where he defines code quality.
And its no secret some people are merely trolling here, or are fanboys of their own prefered license (BSD license, LGPL, GPL, etc). It gets old…
And its no secret some people are merely trolling here, or are fanboys of their own prefered license
I think that having a preferred license (and/or a preferred OS) is ok.
Being a fanboy is puerile.
Spreading FUD, that’s disgusting.
The statistics are not really valid and are skewed in Linux’s favour. The type of bugs identified in this research are those that can be found programmatically. This type of scan has been conducted numerous times before and the kernel coders have already corrected large numbers of them. Typical commercial software does not usually undergo this process and so has a relatively higher count of this type of bug. However, the type of bug which is a subtle logic trap or poor error handling has not been identified and is quite possibly equally common in commercial software as it is in in Linux ernel code. This statistic says very little about the relative frequency of the type of bugs which are likely to affect the user.
abdulhaq
I think OSNews should have articles which are summaries of the comments on previous articles minus all the FUD spreading. But that probably make for pretty short summaries.
I never once mentioned product quality, where did you get that from? I said tools like these CAN help you produce better code and find flaws, but it’s no good as a metric for the total number of defects or bugs.
Logic flaws and improper implementation of a function’s behaviour are code defects that won’t get picked up and relying on these kind of tools to produce numbers for this can cause you to believe that nothing is wrong with your code even though it’s completely broken.
Summary: Useful aid, lousy measurement.
so its not fud at all
Your persistence is touching. Too bad it has been *proved*, few messages above, that you’re indeed spreading FUD.
Anybody who can read can judge for themselves… and this pretty much closes the conversation, as far as I’m concerned.
”
Your persistence is touching. Too bad it has been *proved*, few messages above, that you’re indeed spreading FUD. ”
except in your imagination it proves nothing and yes people can conclude easily that you have been spamming this thread all over unrelated news comments and have been moded down in every single case. so much for being a good bsd evangelist.
Compare the linux kernel, which consists of around 6million lines of code, to a complete operating system, which consists of over 40million lines of code. Cute, very cute.
What should be tested isn’t the number of bugs, because quite frankly, both are as bad as each other, but how they’re addressed once found by internally, third parties and customers.
Its one thing to have bugs, its a different thing entirely to be able to address those bugs in a speedy and accurate manner. No use boasting about incredible bug fixing turn arounds if the net result is 2 weeks worth of continuous patches for patches because the first patch fixed something, broke something and made something else vulnerable in the same instance.
Well, this is due to any readers I might have bothered in the other threads:
I actually went out of line in posting 6 times the same short message (“Beware of what this guy says” + a link to this discussion). I understand the modding down, since personal stuff is against the rules no matter what.
The fact is, I think that having a preferred OS is one thing; spreading FUD is another. The first one is normal, the second one is disgusting.
Moreover, I think that when someone speaks 1) under the cover of anonimity and 2) with a numeric IP difficult to memorize, he makes it difficult for other people to remember who he is, and that’s not really nice.
Anyway, with regards to the FUD thing, it’s all above in this thread, so everybody can read for themselves and come to conclusions that are pretty objective.
You know I could have sworn Linus’s last name was Torvalds not Trovalds.