Towards the evaluation of OSS trustworthiness: Lessons learned from the observation of relevant OSS projects

Abstract

To facilitate the adoption of open-source software (OSS) in industry, it is important to provide potential users (i.e., those who could decide to adopt OSS) with the means for evaluating the trustworthiness of OS products. This paper presents part of the work done in the QualiPSo project for this purpose. A set of factors that are believed to affect the perception of trustworthiness are introduced. In order to test the feasibility of deriving a correct, complete and reliable evaluation of trustworthiness on the basis of these factors, a set of well-known OSS projects have been chosen. Then, the possibility to assess the proposed factors on each project was verified: not all the factors appear to be observable or measurable. The paper reports what information is available to support the evaluation and what is not. This knowledge is considered to be useful to users, who are warned that there are still dark areas in the characterization of OSS products, and to developers, who should provide more data and characteristics on their products in order to support their adoption. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.