Sacred Cow Dung: Zagat Guide to Open Source?

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August 02, 2005

Zagat Guide to Open Source?

Open source minimises redundant coding efforts by starting with a common body of community code — so why not minimise redundant evaluations by starting with a common body of community evaluations? Makes sense — A Zagat Guide to Open Source.

Enter Business Readiness Ratings (BRR)

In their words —

Business Readiness Ratings (BRR) is being proposed as a new standard model for rating open source software. It is intended to enable the entire community (enterprise adopters and developers) to rate software in an open and standardised way. BRR is a community initiative that is being sponsored by Carnegie Mellon West Center for Open Source Investigation, O'Reilly CodeZoo, SpikeSource and Intel. Phase one is a public comment period. We are asking the community to provide feedback and help shape this standard to make it useful to both enterprise adopters and open source developers.

BRR will give companies a trusted, unbiased source for determining whether the open source software they are considering is mature enough to adopt. There are over 100,000 open source projects listed on SourceForge, CodeHaus, Tigris, Java.net and Open Symphony. Some widely adopted projects have become high-quality software suitable for mission critical production environments. Many others are less mature and pose potential risks. Today, companies evaluate open source suitability based on homegrown assessment methods without access to useful assessment data or methods.

The ultimate goal of BRR is to give companies a trusted, unbiased source for determining whether the open source software they are considering is mature enough to adopt. It will help adopters assess which open source software is best suited to their needs and enable them to share findings with the community. It promotes use and adoption of open source software and may assist developers in creating and delivering software geared to enterprise use.

This “clearinghouse” of customer feedback makes incredibly good sense at first blush. But I’m not sure how you can tease out a true Zagat-style customer-centered rating system in such a dynamic environment.

The Zagat approach makes sense when —

1) you have a clear demarcation between the chef’s being evaluated and the customers being fed who are doing the evaluations, and

2) you have relatively fixed menus being evaluated.

However, unlike a restaurant that delivers a fixed menu which can be evaluated at a point in time, open source is more like a stockpot on the backburner — constantly changing and being added to — always there and ready to be incorporated into any dish that requires it — but never to be consumed on its own “as is”.

And unlike a restaurant, the customers are in the kitchen cooking with the chefs. In fact, with open source, you could argue either 1) there are no chefs or 2) everyone is a chef. Either way, the question becomes: So who is evaluating whom?

And then, of course, that blurring between chef and customer is one of the major strengths of open source. Customers get exactly what they what to eat when they want to eat — not just what the chef has decided to make and when he decides to make it. And with open source, if the recipe is bland, the community works to improve it. The menu keeps getting better overtime.

So in the end, I’m not sure how this evaluation system is not already embodied in the existing open source project management process — which is entirely transparent and open to inspection by definition.

Perhaps what is really needed is some standardised best practices regarding Project Status Reporting and Implementation Tracking which could be incorporated into the existing open source development process and maintained by the existing “code clearinghouses”.

Standardised reporting and tracking would make it a bit easier for potential enterprise “master chefs” to quickly compare various “stocks” they can use as a starting points for their latest culinary masterpieces.

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