Open source quality checker released

An open source software project, originally propped up by European Commission (EC) funds, has released an alpha version of its quality control program, Alitheia Core.

Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software (SQO-OSS – pronounced squash) is intended to develop tools based on identified metrics to define and check the quality of open source software.

European businesses, academics and open source software projects developed the new application.

Alitheia Core has been released under the 2-clause BSD licence. Features include system admin for new project data installs, a cross-language metrics tool and a web-based user interface that will display calculation results.

The group’s project coordinator Professor Diomidis Spinellis said: “This release opens up SQO-OSS to the scrutiny of the open source software developers and users community. It demonstrates SQO-OSS's commitment to the deployment of a practical working system.”

In recent months the EC has upped its apparent commitment to open source adoption among government agencies throughout the 27 member states.

It is currently completing work on a draft of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) 2.0 that was expected to be available from tomorrow for public scrutiny. However, some last-minute tweaking has pushed back its publication by at least several days.

The main crux of the new framework is that European governments, firms and users should “be prepared and volunteer to share and reuse”, and “adopt open standards and specifications”.

That’s a move which has angered the Business Software Alliance (BSA). Earlier this month it slammed the EC for continuing to tout what it sees as “narrowly defined open standards” in its fight to achieve interoperability among government IT departments.

BSA’s European software policy director, Benoit Müller, put forward the group’s argument to El Reg. He claimed that the EC’s approach was “dogmatic”. Müller argued that such a “narrow-minded” view would stymie Europe’s competitiveness because it overlooks what he described as the “beneficial roles of IP within standardisation.”

We asked EC interoperability spokesman Karel De Vriendt if the BSA’s comments had any bearings on the fact that the draft publication of EIF 2.0 had been delayed by up to a week.

“You do not need to search for any reason other than that the authors going through a last reading before publishing need a few days more,” he said via email. “As said before, everyone can comment during the public review period but we are certainly not going to start considering comments we receive before the text is available.”

Meanwhile, a new study from analyst firm Forrester has revealed that the UK is languishing at the bottom of the European and North American open source adoption pile.

According to the report, only 15 per cent of Blighty-based organisations currently use open source software.

It also found that lower cost was the main driver for deploying open source software among corporates. However, giving code back to the open source community was less important to businesses adopting the technology.

Results of the study were garnered from application developers and enterprise software architects working at European firms who use open source. ®