The market for open source: An intelligent virtual open source marketplace

Abstract

This paper describes the MARKOS (the MARKet for Open Source) European Project, a FP7-ICT-2011-8 STREP project, which aims to realize a service and an interactive application providing an integrated view on the open source projects available on the web, focusing on functional, structural, and licenses aspects of software source code. MARKOS involves 7 partners from 5 countries, including industries, universities, and research institutions. MARKOS differs from other services available on the Web — which often provide textual-based code search — in that it provides the possibility to browse the code structure at a high level of abstraction, in order to facilitate the understanding of the software from a technical point of view. Also, it highlights relationships between software components released by different projects, giving an integrated view of the available Open Source software at a global scale. Last, but not least, MARKOS is able to highlight potential legal issues due to license incompatibilities, providing explanations for these issues and supporting developers in the search for alternative solutions to their problems. MARKOS will involve end users in order to allow to practice its results in scenarios coming from industrial and Open Source communities.