Over the past seven years, the Coverity Scan service has analyzed nearly 850 million lines of code from more than 300 open source projects including Linux, PHP and Apache.
Code quality for open source software continues to mirror that of proprietary software–and both continue to surpass the industry standard for software quality.
Defect density (defects per 1,000 lines of software code) is a commonly used measurement for software quality. The analysis found an average defect density of .69 for open source software projects that leverage the Coverity Scan service, and an average defect density of .68 for proprietary code developed by Coverity enterprise customers.
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