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Rating System for Open Source Software

Posted by timothy on from the smartly-smartly dept.

prostoalex writes "Carnegie Mellon University, Intel and SpikeSource are launching a rating system for open source software, New York Times says. OpenBRR 'is being proposed as a new standard model for rating open source software. It is intended to enable the entire community (enterprise adopters and developers) to rate software in an open and standardized way.'"

2 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. FUD from the NYT by Catamaran · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The author of the article talks as though evaluating software objectively were a problem unique to adopters of Open Source:
    Free software, despite the price, can be confusing and costly for corporations to use. A few freely distributed programs, like the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server, have become well known, but most are still unproved.
    A more simple and accurate statement would be, "Software can be confusing and costly".
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  2. I can see how you might feel that way.. by msimm · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But the truth is propriety software is quite well reviewed (there's an entire industry who makes it their business to review and recommend commercial software, usually somewhat usefully).

    Reading reviews of you're favorite Windows Antivirus software or researching an enterprise class database package will turn up a wealth of infomation (of course you still need to dig into it and make the final decision, but some things simply can't be helped:).

    OSS software is comparably a total mess, with only certain major projects (and not surpisingly usually projects with some sort commercial support, i.e. apache, mysql, sendmail, etc, but the water gets pretty muddy quickly).

    And aside from all those mainly concrete (maybe to you and I anyway) worries there are other concerns when reviewing OSS software for deployment in a business/production environment: support, boss appeal; someone has to sign off even if the software is free, that the software is mature/will meet or exceed your needs and that (if you decide to leave the company) its reasonably well supported (so someone that comes in and doesn't know the particular software has a reasonably good chance of configuring and maintaining it).

    Those crazy business people.

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