| Compared to what? Proprietary corporate CRUD code? How about comparing to BSD, Hurd, Haiku, Mach etc.? Edit: This article has better details.
http://gcn.com/blogs/pulse/2013/05/linux-leads-in-open-sourc... "The finding is based on an analysis by the Coverity Scan Service, which for more than seven years analyzed 850 million lines of code from more than 300 open-source projects, including those written in Linux, PHP and Apache." "In general, Coverity found the average quality of open-source software was virtually equal to that of proprietary software. Open-source projects showed an average defect density of .69, the study found, a dead heat with the .68 for proprietary code developed by enterprise customers of the service. Although the average rates of defects in the two types of code are nearly identical, researchers did find a difference in quality trends based on the size of the development project. For instance, as proprietary software coding projects passed 1 million lines of code, defect density dropped from .98 to .66, a sign that software quality rises in proprietary projects of that size. That trend reversed itself in the cost of open-source code, researchers found. Open source projects between 500,000 and 1 million lines of code had a defect density of .44, which grew to .75 when those projects went over the 1 million line mark." |
Meanwhile, open source projects like to refactor (somebody would say reinvent the wheel) forever and ever, constantly ripping out old code for new, so defect density is stable and simply rises in line with overall complexity (which obviously rises with project size).
I'd be curious to look also at developers' turnaround rates: once you leave a company you can't keep hacking on their code, which is something you can actually do with open-source. As old developers leave, their code lies untouched for fear of breaking anything, and again gets fossilised.