eWeek: Open Software, Secure Software

“Fifty-plus years ago Grace Hopper used her experiences with
programming the UNIVAC with FLOW-MATIC (an open-source project) to
write her first compiler paper and the modern era of computing
programming began. Some would also say that things haven’t improved
much since her day.

“Indeed, the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) estimated that in 2001 $59.5 billion annually, about 0.6
percent of the gross domestic product was being lost because of
software bugs. The Sustainable Computing Consortium (SCC), an
academic, government and business initiative to drive IT
improvements estimates that’s on the low side. Its estimate is that
defective computer systems cost U.S. companies alone over $200
billion annually. Yow!

“Hardly a week goes by that we don’t report a major software bug
or security hole at eWEEK.com. As Gregory Tassey, the senior
economist in charge of the NIST report says, ‘Software is at the
extreme end in terms of errors or bugs that are in typical products
when they are sold…'”

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