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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
 EU support for open source software
An EU-funded consortium will address one of the perceived
barriers for the adoption of open source software and prove once and for all
that software which is free and publishes its source code, is capable of outperforming
anything else on the market. ‘Flossquality.eu’ is
an initiative made up of the three EU research projects: QUALOSS, FLOSSMETRICS
and SQO-OSS, demonstrating a strong commitment between partners involved in
different projects. The intention is that this initiative will facilitate access
to information by disseminating news via a joint RSS feed. ‘Flossquality.eu’ will
transform the cooperative way of working between these corresponding projects
into hard evidence regarding software quality in an open source.
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Each project is dedicated to open source software quality research, with many partners being involved in two or three of these research projects, and exchanging data on a daily basis so as to improve the quality of their research.
The first project, QUALOSS (Quality in Open Source Software) has been set up to develop a high level methodology, a kind of 'quality seal', for benchmarking the quality of open source software. This in turn will ease the strategic decision of integrating adequate F/OSS components into software systems. The quality assessment methodology will combine data from software products, such as source codes and documentation, with data concerning the developer community of an Open Source solution. This is of interest since their activity will have a direct impact on the long-term usability and robustness of the software being developed.
Industry, SMEs, the public sector and private individuals all require detailed, reliable and complete information about libre software, especially as regards its development process, productivity and the quality of its results. These groups all seek to benchmark the performance of individual projects. The FLOSSMETRICS (Free/Libre Open Source Software Metrics) project meets these needs by analysing literally thousands of libre software projects using established techniques and tools.
The SQO-OSS (Software Quality Observatory of Open Source Software) project is a consortium of leading open source groups, consultants and research bodies that is measuring the quality of open source software. The project seeks to increase the competitiveness of European software development SMEs in the global market place. This can be achieved by taking a holistic approach to software quality assessment and by focusing initially on open source software. The project uses many different sources of quality indicators to create a set of metrics that may be applied automatically to a software project’s repository in order to extract quantifiable measurements of its quality.
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More information:
Flossquality
'GEANT2 link-up complete', European Research Headlines, 23 April 2007
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