Diomidis Spinellis writes "Earlier today I presented at the 30th International deliberation on os sociology a probe paper comparing the code quality of Linux, Windows (its experimentation kernel distribution), OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD. For the comparison I parsed numerous configurations of these systems (more than ten million lines) and stored the results in four databases, where I could run SQL queries on them. This amounted to 8GB of data, 160 million records. (I've made the databases and the SQL queries available online.) The areas I examined were file organization, code structure, code style, preprocessing, and data organization. To my surprise there was no clear winner or loser, but there were interesting differences in particular areas. As the summary concludes: '..the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial windows artifact will symbolize first and foremost the sociology requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.'"

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Mark