Most open source software is better

That's now how Business Week spun it, however. "Insecurity in Open Source" is their headline.

The story is that Coverity ran 50 open source projects through its bug-checking system, as well as products from 100 proprietary makers.

"On average, open-source software is of higher quality than proprietary software," Chelf wrote. But 11 of the 15 top-rated programs were proprietary.

Sounds fair enough. Most open source projects are newer than the proprietary products they seek to displace. Chelf said one unnamed proprietary product in aerospace had one-fifth the number of bugs as any open source product out there.

But here's the thing. He can't say which one. The data is proprietary. So, in fact, is the data on all proprietary products. There is just no way to know how buggy (or non-buggy) proprietary products might be. But you can know how buggy the open source projects are, because Coverity published those results on the Web.

So which side should you trust? Should you trust code that might really be best in class, or might be garbage? Or should you trust code that you can see, and whose performance in bug tests you can measure?

Your choice.