Open Source Business Readiness Ratings

First -- I just loved Ken's post on GeoTagging. What a great collection of links he's included in his post. We've got a couple projects at UI that could potentially use this type of interface/solution.



I just got my weekly Nemertes Impact Analysis (Nemertes specializes in quantifying the business impact of technology) and this one focuses on the growth of Enterprise use of Open Source tools. Specifically, Nemertes reports that Intel and Carnegie Mellon.West Center for Open Source Investigation have developed a tool to evaluate the maturity of various open source tools and initiatives:

The Business Readiness Ratings framework provides enterprise organizations with a "one-stop shop” from which to assess these applications, particularly in terms of business applicability. The BRR is intended to serve as a growing repository incorporating consistent, standardized feedback from users regarding open-source software quality.

While it's obviously not perfect:

The downside to the BRR ratings from an enterprise standpoint is lack of granularity around what Nemertes sees as the most critical component: service and support.

that seems like a very thoughtful way to evaluate the long-term viability of various open source projects. Right now we do it by evaluating how active the community is, the software feature set, and how often updates are released. It's nice to see the community coming together for formalize a system for doing this evaluation.



20050809 - Follow-up to this article. Neil McAllister writes about the same topic, "Does a ratings standard make sense for open source?" in this week's InfoWorld.