From TRL to MRL: Assessing Open Source Project Market Readiness
Channel: FOSDEM
Date: 2018-03-10

by Cédric Thomas

At: FOSDEM 2017

This talk presents OW2's efforts, experience, vision and methodology to assessthe market readiness of open source softwa re. If ''open source software haswon'' it remains that many conventional managers are not comfortable with it :rating open source market readiness can be a powerful tool to help decisionmakers. This presentation will cover: \- the value chain of open sourcesoftware : an analysis of what makes software valuable from the stand point ofthe end-user and what are the stakeholders in the value creation process; \-the OW2 Open-source Sofware Capability Assessment Radar (OSCAR) platform, anopen-source umbrella project implementing the OSCAR model by combining severalopen-source quality tools such as SonarQube, Fossology, ScanCode, Spago4Q, andoutcomes from the RISCOSS European collaborative project; \- the first versionof OW2 OSS Market Readiness Level (MRL, derived from NASA's TRL or TechnologyReadiness Levels) scale derived from data ana analysis provided by OSCAR, awork in progress that we are happy to share with and submit to the audience.

This talk presents OW2's efforts, experience, vision and methodology to assessthe market readiness of open source softwa re. If ''open source software haswon'' it remains that many conventional managers are not comfortable with it :rating open source market readiness can be a powerful tool to help decisionmakers.

OSS is everywhere in our enterprise information systems and in nearly all theelectronic systems we interact with daily, such as communication devices,cars, trains, healthcare systems, entertainment environments. With theincreasing success of OSS software and in parallel the advent of OSS qualityfailures such as Heartbleed, the quality and sustainability of OSS componentswe use and produce is becoming progressively as important as the quality ofthe air we breathe.

OSS come in many different flavors. At OW2 identify three broad categories ofprojects. Those that are developed by a grassroot community, those that areessentialy developed and commercially supported by private companies and thosethat result from the collaborative efforts of ecosystems of commercialcompanies and research organisations. Our efforts aim at applying a commonvalue chain analysis across the different categories enable to be able tocompare them along a unified scale scale of market readiness levels. Thegrowing number of companies that specialize in assessing open source softwarereflect how crucial this topic is becoming for the whole economy.

Initially derived from the seminal NASA's Technology Readiness Levels scaleand inspired by, among others, the SEI Capability Maturity Model, severalmodels and tools have been created in the last 20 years for describing andanalyzing the quality and maturity of open-source software. These early modelsaim at capturing the projects' general software engineering quality drivers,their open-source related aspects such as their IP and community management.The most well-known initiatives include the Qualipso Open Maturity Model, theQualification and Selection of Open Source software methodology, the SoftwareSustainability Maturity Model (OSS Watch), the NASA Reuse Readiness Levels andthe PolarSys Maturity Assessment model. More recently, the Linux Foundationhas launched the "Badge Program" project for drafting a new quality model foropen-source software.

The existing models raise several questions: \- first of all, theses models donot always follow the same pace as the IT world: several models were draftedin a pre-cloud, pre-devops, pre-heartbleed area and do not cover importantaspects of modern OSS such as the ability to deploy easily a project into oneor several cloud environments. \- second, the models generally do not providea reference implementation for feeding the data with open-source software andfor providing both high-level and detailed quality analysis. \- third, whileit's easy to get a general consensus on software quality, divergences canappear when going into the details and attributing weights to the criteria,hence a need for a flexible model, \- fourth, these models concentrate on thetechnical assessment of software and projects and their interest from theperspective of the contributor

This lightning talk will introduce: \- our analysis the value chain of opensource software: what makes software valuable from the stand point of the end-user and what are the stakeholders in the value chain; \- the OW2 Open-sourceSofware Capability Assessment Radar (OSCAR) platform, an open-source umbrellaproject implementing the OSCAR model by combining several open-source qualitytools such as SonarQube, Fossology, ScanCode, Spago4Q, and outcomes from theRISCOSS European collaborative project. \- the first version of OW2 OSS MarketReadiness Level (MRL) scale derived from data ana analysis provided by OSCAR,a work in progress that we are happy to share with and submit to the audience..


Room: H.2215 (Ferrer)
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