DHS has sponsored use of Coverity’s products against several prominent Free/Open Source projects’ work product. It’s great news. The projects never could afford to sponsor such themselves, and they will doubtless find and fix some errors. ZDNet’s coverage makes you wonder just what kind of errors they’ll find, though:

Coverity uses static source-code analysis to spot errors in code, such as open brackets. Projects on Rung 2 will move on to use the company’s “satisfiability” techniques, which use a bit-accurate representation of a software system, translating every relevant software operation into Boolean values (true and false) and Boolean operators (such as and, not, or).

Sigh.