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Manifesto

About the need of a method

From a company point of view, choosing to opt for a piece of software as part of its information system, that piece of software being open or closed source, is based on the analysis of the needs and constraints (technical, functional and strategic) and matching the piece of software with the requirements. However, it is necessary to have a method of qualification and selection suited to free and open source software while studying its adoption.

It is indeed extremely important to scrutinize the specific constraints and risks of the free and open source software. This domain being broad and rich, it is also necessary to have a method of qualification that allows to differentiate the often many potential matching components, from a technical, functional and strategic point of view.

In addition to these “natural” questions:

  • Which piece of software matches my current and anticipated technical needs?
  • Which piece of software matches my current and anticipated functional needs?

Here are some questions that every company should ask before making a decision:

  • What is the continuity of this piece of software? What are the odds of a fork? How to anticipate and manage it?
  • What is the level of stability to expect? How to manage dysfunctions?
  • What is the required and available level of support of this piece of software?
  • Is it possible to influence the software development (adding new features)?

To serenely answer these questions and make an informed decision while managing the risks, it is required to have a method that allows to:

  • Qualify a piece of software by integrating the specificity of free and open source software.
  • Compare several piece of software depending of the needs and weighting criteria to make a final decision

Those different points led us to design and formalize the method of Qualification and Selection of Open Source software (QSOS).

About the need of a free method

In our opinion, such a method must be distributed to anyone under a free license. Only such a license is indeed able to guarantee the promotion of the free and Open Source movement, through : - the possibility of the reuse of the evaluations by anyone ; - the quality and objectivity of the generated documents, that can always be improved through transparency and peer review.

Hence, we decided to distribute the QSOS method and the generated documents (templates and identity cards) under the GNU Free Documentation License. The tools developed to easily apply this method are distributed under the GNU General Public License