Comparative assessment of open source software using easy accessible data

Abstract

Open source (usually free of charge) software has become increasingly prominent in last few years. Previous research of software being developed under open source license has showed, that some open source products can reach qualitative and popularity level of commercial (usually closed-source) counterparts. However, a lot of open source software do not attain maturity. This shows that their projects have problems and that the quality of projects outcomes (software) can vary. Therefore an assessment model is necessary which could filter out only suitable (qualitative) products. This paper presents a quantitative basis for evaluating an open source product based on multiple criteria of software quality. In contrary to other software assessment models, which are time-consuming and expensive, the proposed model uses easy accessible quantitative data, specific for open source projects. A set of measurements for evaluating open source software together with proposed model and a practical example is presented