A consortium consisting of leading European open source
projects, consultants and research bodies has secured EU funding to
measure the quality of open source software.
The Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software
(SQO-OSS) consortium has raised €3.2m (£1.7m) to build tools, which
will enable software companies and open source projects to
benchmark the quality of their application's source code and prove
its suitability for enterprise deployment.
The project aims to address one of the perceived barriers to
entry in the adoption of open source software - proof that software
which is free and has its source code published can out-perform
more expensive, brand-marketed software.
Led by the Athens University of Economics and Business,
consortium participants include UK-based Sirius Corporation, KDE
e.V. and ProSyst in Germany, KDAB in Sweden, and the Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki, Greece.
The project will: deliver a plug-in based quality assessment
platform, featuring a web and an IDE front-end; develop a set of
software metrics that will take into account quality indicators
from data that is present in an open source project's repository;
and publish a league of open source software applications,
categorised by their quality.
The consortium’s output will also be released under the BSD
licence to stimulate business interest.
Professor Diomidis Spinellis, project leader, said, "An industry
matures when its products become standardised commodities. Through
the objective evaluation of open source projects, SQO-OSS will
provide many smaller and less known projects with the visibility
and respectability they deserve."