A university, a start-up company and chip maker 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 today is the brainchild of

University - Carnegie Mellon University West's Center for OS Investigation
Start Up - SpikeSource
Chip Maker - Intel Corp.

"The model allows users and developers to get a feeling for the appropriateness of open-source software for their environment," said Joaquin Ruiz, vice president of product marketing at SpikeSource. The model is expected to save organizations a good deal of time they would have spent doing their own in-house assessment of open-source projects.

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. The categories in turn consist of a number of additional metrics. For example, under the rating "quality," metrics will 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 three are.

Source: ComputerWorldPrashanth RaiTag(s): Open Source