Open Source Code Contains Security Holes

Slashdot points to an article published yesterday that covers the US Department of Homeland Security's program for examining the security of open source code. Popular open source code dynamic languages like Samba, PHP, Perl, Tcl, and backup and recovery software Amanda were found to have hundreds of security holes and defects.

The DHSS granted a $300,000 contract to Coverity in March 2006 to review code generated by 180 open source projects resulting in fixing 7826 open source project defects.

For details see Charles Babcock's article in InformationWeek.