Evaluation Methods for FOSS: the Business Readiness Rating Tony Wasserman Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Center for Open Source Investigation
Evaluation Issues for Company Adoption of Open Source Software Licensing issues Fitness for use (functions, usability, installability) Comparison with commercial products Product quality Support and training Corporate IT policies concerning use of open source Management of updates Integration with other software
Business Obstacles to Adoption Management fear and uncertainty OS software not on IT-approved list Effective prevention by commercial vendors Concerns about support and training Missing features/functionality compared to commercial products Inferior performance or functionality Licensing and litigation concerns
The Business Readiness Rating Model An open, comprehensive, standard assessment empirical model – Trusted, widely used, compatible, and tunable A framework for calibrating “Business Readiness” of free and open source software Goal: provide a trusted, unbiased source for evaluation of open source software
Functionality Operational software characteristics Reliability, scalability, performance, usability, security, installation, interoperability Support and services Documentation Development process Leadership, project data, task assignments Software Technology Attributes Architecture, code quality Adoption Size, activity level, community Evaluation Categories for FOSS
Using the Model – 4 phases
Business Readiness Rating model
Status of BRR project Need for both objective and subjective data about projects Continue to define functional characteristics for software in various categories (using IDC taxonomy) Implementing automated tools – Mining the source code repositories – Collecting software reviews Need to revitalize project with more people
Contact information Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman post: Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Moffett Field, CA USA tel: (m) Skype:tony_wasserman Twitter: twasserman