Way2Top

Want to develop a Product out of Open Source Technologies, Frameworks and tools? You should be glad, because you don’t have to worry about the availability of options…But, you should be concerned, because the options available are aplenty and sometimes drive you to madness! Instead of choosing a Open source project based on word-of-mouth or based on the recommendation from Technical leads/expert developers…you can choose the path of “A formal evaluation”. There are two prominent frameworks available to systematically evaluate open source projects.

Business Readiness Rating (BRR)
Business Readiness Ratingâ„¢ (BRR) is being proposed as a new standard model for rating open source software. It is intended to enable the entire community (enterprise adopters and developers) to rate software in an open and standardized way.

Open Source Maturity Model (OSMM)
The Open Source Maturity Modelâ„¢ (OSMM) is a formal process to assess the maturity level of open source software. Developed by Navica, the OSMM is itself open source, freely available for any organization to use in their open source work.

BRR came into existence quite recently (and still evolving) while OSMM has been in existence for quite some time. Basically, these two frameworks evaluate each open source project based on 10-14 parameters. The final rating helps one to decide whether the open-source project is ready for mission-critical enterprise use.

The parameters that are evaluated are Functionality, Usability, Quality, Security, Performance, Scalability, Architecture, Support, Documentation, Adoption and Community. The last 2 parameters are quite important for open-source initiatives. The quality of the open source is directly proportional to the adoption and community.

So, next time you need to evaluate any open-source project, why not evaluate it using these frameworks and establish your professionalism?