The European Union is funding a consortium that will test the quality of open-source software. The money will help organizations determine whether the open-source software that they’re using will be suitable for deployment in the enterprise.

The Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software has been awarded 1.6 million euros (US$2 million) under the union’s Sixth Framework Program; the total cost of the project is estimated to be 2.47 million euros. The project will be led by the Athens University of Economics and Business. Other members of the consortium include U.K.-based Sirius Corporation, KDE and ProSyst in Germany, KDAB in Sweden and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

The project’s aims include: delivering a plug-in-based quality assessment platform, featuring a Web and an IDE front end; the development of a set of software metrics that will take into account quality indicators from data that is present in a project’s repository; and the publishing of a league of open-source software applications, categorized by their quality. The consortium hopes to release its output under the BSD license to stimulate business interest.

Professor Diomidis Spinellis, who’s leading the project, said: "An industry matures when its products become standardized commodities. Through the objective evaluation of open-source projects, SQO-OSS will provide many smaller and less-known projects with the visibility and respectability they deserve."

-Maxwell Cooter, Techworld.com (London)

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