Linux Journal: The U.S. Software Industry and Software Quality: Another Detroit in the Making?

“Will software makers follow the U.S. auto industry of old
down the road of glitzware?“

“Do computer users care about quality? Linux advocates hope so,
because it’s unquestionably the case that open-source development
methods are capable of producing some very fine software indeed. As
open-source guru Eric Raymond points out, the nature of open-source
development – such as the wide-open availability of the underlying
source code, the ongoing testing of code in real-world settings,
the frequent release cycles – can produce code that’s remarkably
free from programming errors. The sheer number of developers helps,
too; as Linus Torvalds puts it, “With enough eyeballs, all bugs are
shallow.”

“To be sure, not every program developed with open-source
methods is as beautifully crafted as the Linux kernel, but there’s
no disputing the fact that open-source development can indeed
produce software of exceptional quality. If quality matters, Linux
ought to have an edge over its commercial competitors. According to
one estimate by a Microsoft internal (see Minasi 2000:255), the
firm’s products typically contain an average of 14 to 17 errors per
1,000 lines of code – a level of quality that can be described as
mediocre. But people keep buying Microsoft products. Vendor
executives, Microsoft’s among them, look at their profits and ask
why they should bother improving their firms’ software. Sure, they
admit, it’s possible to produce software of space-shuttle quality,
but doing so is very expensive. Maybe that level of quality is
needed in life-critical systems, such as medical software, but who
needs a quality word processor? Consumers don’t care, they
conclude, and so they keep putting out products that are “good
enough.”

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