Developers have fixed more than 900 bugs in a brace of popular open source projects and applications since details were first made public last month.

Defect tracking specialist Coverity said developers have fixed bugs in 32 open source packages and applications at a rate of one every six minutes. In just seven days alone, defect density for the 32 dropped from 0.434 per thousand lines of code to 0.371.

Coverity catalogued the defects under a study sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security designed to assess the security of open source software. The company said the stampede to fix the software got underway in the week following publication. The list of packages tackled play a strong part in the Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Phyton (LAMP) stack.

Coverity chief technology officer Ben Chelf said in a statement the long-term goal of the study is to understand how to improve the development process and security for open, as well as closed source, software.

For more details of defects click here (http://scan.coverity.com/). ®

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