A group of nine research institutes, software development firms and IT companies are building Ossmeter, a platform to evaluate and compare open source software packages and the communities involved in them. The platform will be available as a public service, but the software will also be shared using an open source licence. A study on Ossmeter was published earlier this week by Joinup's OSOR community.
Ossmeter was made possible by a 2.6 million grant from the European Union, one of the projects funded by its Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development (FP7).
Evaluating whether an open source software package meets the requirements for a specific application, or deciding which package from multiple candidates is the best match, is not an easy task, the OSOR study reports. It requires information on the quality and maturity of the software itself, on the ongoing development is and on how extensive the user support by the community is.
Ossmeter aims to reduce the time needed for investigating and comparing open source alternatives. It wants to decrease the time needed to assess the quality of the code by 30 per cent. The consortium hopes to offer a 90 per cent reduction in the efforts needed to assess the support provided by bug tracking systems and other communication channels, and equally lessen the efforts to monitor and compare solutions.
The Ossmeter toolset will be verified using three test cases. Two of these are industrial case studies in IT services and construction, and the third case contains the OSS projects related to the Eclipse software development platform.