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Measuring Openness In Open Source Projects

Posted by Soulskill on from the get-your-tape-measure dept.

suy writes "Several open source projects exist under a variety of licenses, and we qualify them as free/open source depending on the license under which the final product is released. But there are other considerations, like the existence of a public roadmap, participation in the decision making, or access to the latest source code to make contributions. Vision Mobile has published a report that compares and measures the openness of several open source projects: Android, Eclipse, Linux, MeeGo, Mozilla, Qt, Symbian (till the existence of the Foundation) and WebKit. Eclipse and Linux scored the highest and Android the lowest." A related article about the report asks whether open source needs corporate backing to truly succeed.

4 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Openness by beelsebob · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yep, and yet somehow people still scream about how open Android is and how locked down iOS is.

  2. Re:Open Source has nothing to do with openness by beelsebob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Uhhh, no... "Open Source" is not a license – it's an idea. There are many licenses that are written with the idea in mind. The idea is *everything* to do with openness.

  3. Re:Openness by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Honeycomb, of course, isn't OSS ATM, but again, they have good reasons for that.

    There really isn't a good reason. If your code is good enough to sell on a device, it's good enough to be opened.

    A lot of Android fanboys do logical loops explaining that Android is truly open, and some parts of it are, but a lot of it isn't. Accept it.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  4. Re:Openness by beelsebob · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That gets you the open source parts of the device... who ever said the drivers were open source? Note, in 99.9% of cases, the drivers *aren't* open source.