Measuring the maturity of open source software

Abstract

There are a number of reasons that encourage the use of open source software `OSS' such as: cost savings, fast time-to-market and high-quality software[1]. Various organizations have considered the use of free software in their IT infrastructure for economic, security or other reasons. With a large number of free software available on the internet, choosing the best one has become a daunting task. In order to solve this problem, different methods have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new method to "measure the maturity of free software" which is relevant and easy to be adopted especially for small and medium enterprises. To evaluate our approach, we tested it in more than twenty companies in order to choose the best free software that will meet their real needs.