Towards an Openness Rating System for Open Source Software

Author

Bein, Wolfgang ; Jeffery, Clinton

Author_Institution

Center for the Adv. Study of Algorithms, Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA

fYear

2010

fDate

5-8 Jan. 2010

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

8

Abstract

Many open source software projects are not very open to third party developers. The point of open source is to enable anyone to fix bugs or add desired capabilities without holding them hostage to the original developers. This principle is important because an open source project´s developers may be unresponsive or unable to meet third party needs, even if funding support for requested improvements is offered.This paper presents a simple rating system for evaluating the openness of software distributions. The rating system considers factors such as platform portability, documentation, licensing, and contribution policy. Several popular open source products are rated in order to illustrate the efficacy of the rating system.

Keywords

information science; program debugging; public domain software; software portability; system documentation; bugs fixing; open source software; openness rating system; software distributions; third party developers; Books; Computer bugs; Computer science; Documentation; Joining processes; Licenses; Mathematics; Open source software; Publishing; Software algorithms;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

System Sciences (HICSS), 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on

Conference_Location

Honolulu, HI

ISSN

1530-1605

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-5509-6

Electronic_ISBN

1530-1605

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/HICSS.2010.405

Filename

5428482