Measuring Openness In Open Source Projects

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.

Comments

Re:Open Source has nothing to do with openness

[beelsebob]

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.

Re:Openness

[phantomfive]

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.