[offtopic] Coverity . . .

[Kuba Ober]

Hi,

Surely enough it's very nice for Coverity to be analyzing code of open source 
projects, but I'm a little bit worried about the essentially inflammatory 
type of marketing they are doing.

I just called their sales and it looks like for up to 375k LOC the yearly fee 
you have to pay to use it is about $25k, in the U.S. market. The fee is same 
whether it's first or subsuequent years. I presume that paying such a price 
starts making sense when you have a 100+ KLOC project. Now, unless a lot of 
open source developers routinely work with 100+ KLOC projects at their 
workplace, the exposure that Coverity gets is merely an annoyance: their 
product is beyond reach of a lot of their audience. To me, they seem to be 
rubbing everyone the wrong way: hey, here's what our very nifty tool does, 
but of course you couldn't afford it.

I don't mean this to be a flamebait, merely an observation. Maybe the OSS 
community could generate enough pressure on Coverity to support smaller 
software developers. I would gladly buy their tool as long as the price was 
right for the size of my codebase.

Cheers, Kuba

P.S. Just for the reference, a less powerful yet still very useful tool, 
FlexeLint for C/C++ (www.gimpel.com), is $998. I was initially thinking that 
for "small" projects Coverity would be around 4-5 times as much. But 25 times 
as much, and the lowest price break being 375KLOC?!