Start-up, Intel join university to judge software efforts.
A university, a start-up and a chip giant are pushing a proposal for a standard model to rate open source software to provide customers with a better sense of the maturity of the more than 100,000 open source projects available today.
The Business Readiness Ratings (BRR) model unveiled last week is the brainchild of Carnegie Mellon University West’s Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI) and is co-sponsored by SpikeSource, an open source testing and certification start-up, and Intel .
“The model allows users and developers to get a feeling for the appropriateness of open source software for their environment,” says Joaquin Ruiz, vice president of product marketing at SpikeSource.
One way of thinking about the BRR model is as a kind of tailored Netflix service, he says. Like the online video-ordering service, users and developers will rate the different open source projects.
The model should save organizations a good deal of time they would have spent in-house trying to assess the wealth of available open source projects, Ruiz says. For instance, if a company is looking for an open source Wiki-type application, seven are available, and he estimates 135 open source general content-management tools are in the market.
For the next three months, COSI, SpikeSource and Intel welcome comment on the BRR model from users and developers, Ruiz says. Based on those comments, the model will be enhanced, and the organizations hope to have the model in production by the year-end, he adds. The model will need to be adaptable to reflect different usage assessments, with the requirements of a university, for example, distinct from those of a large corporation, Ruiz says.
COSI, SpikeSource and Intel have defined 12 categories for assessing open source projects, including how well the software meets users’ needs, its usability, scalability, performance and support.
Each category has a number of metrics. For instance, under the rating “quality,” metrics include users’ estimations of the quality of the software’s design, the code and the testing and how complete and error-free each of these are.
Users rate the categories for a project using a scale of 1 for “unacceptable” up to 5 for “excellent,” and then the 12 categories are weighted in terms of importance.
On the BRR Web site, the model’s sponsors provide a white paper and discussion forums together with samples, standard templates and worksheets of the model. In the white paper, the sponsors state the aim of the model is to offer “a vendor-neutral federated clearinghouse of quantifiable data on open source software packages to help drive their adoption and development.”
