At its user event in Nashville last week, open-source giant Red Hat wooed developers by unveiling a web-based collaboration portal and a software project to help firms automatically test server configurations before deployment.
The 108.redhat.com portal is designed to help firms adopt open-source development methodologies and create more successful projects.
“It’s a collaborative community for developers around open-source and corporate development,” said Karsten Wade, Red Hat senior developer relations manager. He added that the portal could help firms use some principles of open source without necessarily putting all their code in the public domain.
However, Wade stressed that the project is not a rival to established code repositories such as SourceForge. Instead, the main aim is to help firms make better software more easily. Wade argued that open-source development usually results in fewer flaws and so is less costly overall.
A recent study by code-analysis firm Coverity found 985 bugs in the 5.7 million lines of code that make up the Linux 2.6 kernel. In contrast, a study by Carnegie Mellon University reported that a commercial program of a similar size would typically have 5,000 flaws or defects.
Experts estimate that $60bn each year is spent fixing bad software.
Also at the event, Red Hat announced Dogtail, a new open-source testing tool. Dogtail is designed to help firms develop and run their own quality assurance tests for Linux systems prior to deployment. Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice-president, said better testing should drive down costs and improve the reliability and security of deployed software, particularly with online applications.
“Banks use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for money-handling systems, which is one of the most critical applications you can get,” Cormier said. “Such customers don’t necessarily put our products straight into production without running their own tests. These tools make it easier [to do so].” Cormier added that Red Hat might run these tests as a service for customers in future. Dogtail was developed by Red Hat to test its own Linux distributions.
