Q: what has the EU ever done for us?
A: helped promote free and open source software!
Several universities and companies are working collaboratively in the Ossmeter research project on a platform for evaluating and comparing open source software. The European Union is funding Ossmeter’s development to the tune of €2.6 mn. (out of total project costs of €3.4 mn. Ed.) and the software that is ultimately developed will be made available online as a free service and released as free software so it can also be deployed as an in-house quality management tool.
The aim of the project is to reduce the costs of evaluating open source software. Collecting information from associated communication channels such as newsgroups, forums and mailing lists to identify whether user questions are answered in a timely and satisfactory manner, and to estimate the number of experts and users of the software are equally as important as the researchers’ objective, as is a comparison of several open source projects with regard to usage. The platform’s capability will be tested in three use cases.
Ossmeter is being developed by nine European research and industry organisations:
- The Open Group (UK);
- University of York (UK);
- University of Manchester (UK);
- Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (The Netherlands);
- University of L’Aquila (Italy);
- Tecnalia (Spain);
- Softeam (France);
- Uninova (Instituto de Desenvolvimento de Novas Tecnologias, Portugal); and
- Unparallel Innovation (Portugal).
The Open Group is the over-all coordinator and the University of York provides the technical coordination.
For more information on Ossmeter, read Joinup’s original post.