Cédric Thomas

Evaluating open source projects is a permanent challenge that OW2 has chosen to meet by defining a unique composite indicator now applied to its projects. This indicator facilitates the evaluation of open source projects from the point of view of corporate information systems managers. The growth of open source software is taking place in two main directions. First, by moving up the layers of information systems: from the operating system to the business applications, open source software is increasingly used by non-IT specialists. Second, by becoming “mainstream”, open source is reaching out to decision-makers who are unfamiliar with open source. For these new users, educated in the commercial practices of proprietary software vendors, open source remains a counter-intuitive model; its technical, legal and community specificities are a source of uncertainty that is not very favourable to positive decisions. Mainstream decision-makers must hear a language they understand. This is the role of the Market Readiness Levels (MRL) method developed by OW2 for evaluating open source projects. With MRL, decision-makers have a familiar indicator that positions open source projects according to the “business” decision criteria they are used to. Open source is moving towards them.

The talk begins with a presentation of the MRL method, its three levels of analysis and the hundred or so criteria taken into account. It then gives the example of a few OW2 projects evaluated by the method and explains what benefits it brings to the development teams, but also to the end-users and the open source in general

This presentation is about engaging mainstream users for OSS ecosystem sustainability. Open source is becoming mainstream but there are still looming uncertainties about the sustainability of its ecosystem made of some keystone projects and many SMEs. The user is the missing component of the OSS ecosystem’s sustainability. We must put the user back into the equation.

This presentation introduces the Market Readiness Levels index, the OW2 OSS Good Governance initiative and the ReachOut beta-testing platform. three initiatives leveraging the resources and experience of OW2’s European community of open source projects with the ambition to engage mainstream users and make them more comfortable and more committed to the long-term term sustainability and success of the European open source ecosystem.

This talk presents OW2's efforts, experience, vision and methodology to assess the market readiness of open source softwa re. If ''open source software has won'' it remains that many conventional managers are not comfortable with it : rating open source market readiness can be a powerful tool to help decision makers. This presentation will cover: - the value chain of open source software : an analysis of what makes software valuable from the stand point of the end-user and what are the stakeholders in the value creation process; - the OW2 Open-source Sofware Capability Assessment Radar (OSCAR) platform, an open-source umbrella project implementing the OSCAR model by combining several open-source quality tools such as SonarQube, Fossology, ScanCode, Spago4Q, and outcomes from the RISCOSS European collaborative project; - the first version of OW2 OSS Market Readiness Level (MRL, derived from NASA's TRL or Technology Readiness Levels) scale derived from data ana analysis provided by OSCAR, a work in progress that we are happy to share with and submit to the audience.

This talk presents OW2's efforts, experience, vision and methodology to assess the market readiness of open source softwa re. If ''open source software has won'' it remains that many conventional managers are not comfortable with it : rating open source market readiness can be a powerful tool to help decision makers.

OSS is everywhere in our enterprise information systems and in nearly all the electronic systems we interact with daily, such as communication devices, cars, trains, healthcare systems, entertainment environments. With the increasing success of OSS software and in parallel the advent of OSS quality failures such as Heartbleed, the quality and sustainability of OSS components we use and produce is becoming progressively as important as the quality of the air we breathe.

OSS come in many different flavors. At OW2 identify three broad categories of projects. Those that are developed by a grassroot community, those that are essentialy developed and commercially supported by private companies and those that result from the collaborative efforts of ecosystems of commercial companies and research organisations. Our efforts aim at applying a common value chain analysis across the different categories enable to be able to compare them along a unified scale scale of market readiness levels. The growing number of companies that specialize in assessing open source software reflect how crucial this topic is becoming for the whole economy.

Initially derived from the seminal NASA's Technology Readiness Levels scale and inspired by, among others, the SEI Capability Maturity Model, several models and tools have been created in the last 20 years for describing and analyzing the quality and maturity of open-source software. These early models aim at capturing the projects' general software engineering quality drivers, their open-source related aspects such as their IP and community management. The most well-known initiatives include the Qualipso Open Maturity Model, the Qualification and Selection of Open Source software methodology, the Software Sustainability Maturity Model (OSS Watch), the NASA Reuse Readiness Levels and the PolarSys Maturity Assessment model. More recently, the Linux Foundation has launched the "Badge Program" project for drafting a new quality model for open-source software.

The existing models raise several questions: - first of all, theses models do not always follow the same pace as the IT world: several models were drafted in a pre-cloud, pre-devops, pre-heartbleed area and do not cover important aspects of modern OSS such as the ability to deploy easily a project into one or several cloud environments. - second, the models generally do not provide a reference implementation for feeding the data with open-source software and for providing both high-level and detailed quality analysis. - third, while it's easy to get a general consensus on software quality, divergences can appear when going into the details and attributing weights to the criteria, hence a need for a flexible model, - fourth, these models concentrate on the technical assessment of software and projects and their interest from the perspective of the contributor

This lightning talk will introduce: - our analysis the value chain of open source software: what makes software valuable from the stand point of the end-user and what are the stakeholders in the value chain; - the OW2 Open-source Sofware Capability Assessment Radar (OSCAR) platform, an open-source umbrella project implementing the OSCAR model by combining several open-source quality tools such as SonarQube, Fossology, ScanCode, Spago4Q, and outcomes from the RISCOSS European collaborative project. - the first version of OW2 OSS Market Readiness Level (MRL) scale derived from data ana analysis provided by OSCAR, a work in progress that we are happy to share with and submit to the audience. .