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INDUSTRY NEWS


22 May 2008

Open-source security improving


The number of security flaws in open-source software has fallen by 16 per cent over the last two years, a new report has revealed.

According to research conducted by software company Coverity, an analysis of 55 million lines of open source code from 250 popular applications revealed 0.25 errors in every 1,000 lines, a 16 per cent reduction from the 0.3 errors found per 1,000 lines two years ago.

The report, commissioned by the United Stated Department of Homeland Security, identified a total of 23,068 individual defects, the two most common being null pointer deference and resource leaks.

The authors of the report said that a comparison between open-source and commercial software defect density would be enlightening, but added that such a comparison would be unlikely because of the difficulty in finding similar datasets from the two classes of code.

Recently, analyst Gartner suggested that at least 90 per cent of all software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers will include elements of open-source in their technology infrastructure stacks (operating systems, application servers and databases) by 2010.<br/>

© 2006 Adfero Ltd.

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