As the head of Carnegie Mellon West's Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI) and contributor to the Business Readiness Ratings, I can assure you that none of us associated with COSI have any connection to the Software Engineering Institute and the Capability Maturity Model. That said, the CMM has served a useful purpose for some organizations, even if it only gets them focused on the various processes that are needed to build good software. It's interesting to see how many of the tools on project sites like SourceForge are intended to support an organized development process, which was the original goal of the SEI. But "orthogonal" is right: I've shown how you could get a CMM Level 4 rating even if your development tools were pencil and paper, your developers lacked a high school education, and your working environment was a prison cafeteria.
As for Business Readiness Ratings,people and companies are going to do their own evaluations, using the numeric data available on projects, applying their own weightings to the different evaluation categories, considering the intended use (production, experimentation) in the process. Some software that I might use in a research environment may not be ready for use in a mission-critical production environment in a bank -- and the project team may like it that way.
I hope that everyone will evaluate the BRR idea on its own merits, and keep in mind that the ultimate goal is to accelerate the acceptance of open source software in places that have traditionally not even been willing to consider such products.
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As the head of Carnegie Mellon West's Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI) and contributor to the Business Readiness Ratings, I can assure you that none of us associated with COSI have any connection to the Software Engineering Institute and the Capability Maturity Model. That said, the CMM has served a useful purpose for some organizations, even if it only gets them focused on the various processes that are needed to build good software. It's interesting to see how many of the tools on project sites like SourceForge are intended to support an organized development process, which was the original goal of the SEI. But "orthogonal" is right: I've shown how you could get a CMM Level 4 rating even if your development tools were pencil and paper, your developers lacked a high school education, and your working environment was a prison cafeteria. As for Business Readiness Ratings,people and companies are going to do their own evaluations, using the numeric data available on projects, applying their own weightings to the different evaluation categories, considering the intended use (production, experimentation) in the process. Some software that I might use in a research environment may not be ready for use in a mission-critical production environment in a bank -- and the project team may like it that way. I hope that everyone will evaluate the BRR idea on its own merits, and keep in mind that the ultimate goal is to accelerate the acceptance of open source software in places that have traditionally not even been willing to consider such products.