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Coverity has released its 2009 Coverity Scan Open Source Report. This report is the result of a public-private sector research project focused on open source software integrity. Originally initiated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the 2009 Coverity Scan Open Source Report details the findings from analyzing more than 11 billion lines of open source code from 280 open source projects over the last three years.

The Coverity open source integrity report is an objective presentation of open source code quality and defect data collected from the Coverity Scan service. The report findings provide a unique opportunity for the business industry to examine coding and software integrity trends from some of the world's most well-used and popular open source packages, including Firefox, Linux, PHP, Ruby and Samba.

Highlights of the report findings include:

• Overall integrity, quality and security of open source software are improving. The Coverity Scan service measured a 16 percent reduction in static analysis defect density over the past three years among participating projects.
• Open source developers are actively improving software. Since 2006, more than 11,200 defects in open source programs have been eliminated as a result of using the Coverity Scan service. Total developer support has increased with more than 180 projects having active developers scanning and fixing software defects discovered by Scan.
• Projects continue to advance up Coverity Certified "Integrity Rungs" from year to year. In 2009, the number of Rung 1 certified projects increased 32 percent from 2008 and doubled on Rung 2 in the same time period. OpenPAM, Ruby, Samba and tor are the first projects to begin Coverity Integrity Rung 3 certification. Rungs are certification levels indicating high-integrity open source software.
• Most common defect types are holding steady. The most common defect types across participating open source projects are still NULL Pointers, resource leaks, and unintentional ignored expressions.

"The Coverity Scan service began as a public-private research partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to harden the integrity of open source code," said Andy Chou, chief scientist and co-founder of Coverity. "The Coverity Scan service is a key pillar of our strategy to help open source and commercial developers to continually improve the integrity of all software."

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