Security and Bugs in Open Source Software

Those of you concerned about using open source software because it may contain too many bugs can now rest a little more easily. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security funded Stanford University, Coverity and Symantec to complete an analysis describing the number of security bugs found in open source software. The LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) was found to have fewer bugs than other open source software.

As open source products, like the LAMP stack, stand the test of time, they resolve many of the existing issues and become adept at fixing new problems. This is a testament to the maturity of these products and shows that stable, mature open source software can achieve high standards of quality.

It would be really interesting to see this as a comparison of bugs between open source code and proprietary code; however, most proprietary companies will not open up their code to this type of analysis.


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