the current FLOSS (Freely licensed Open Source Software) situation and how QualiPSo .... processes require a specific definition of a maturity model for ...
QualiPSo Position Paper Quality Platform for Open Source Software
Clara Pezuela, Matteo Melideo, Andrea Rossi, Jean-Christophe Spilmont, Julie Marguerite, Ellen Francine Barbosa, José Carlos Maldonado, Matthias Fluegge, Sandro Morasca, Jaime Garza, Alberto Sillitti, Jean-Pierre Laisne, Giuseppe Lauria
Abstract. This paper summarizes the context, the offer and the positioning of QualiPSo project in the Open Source domain. QualiPSo is a unique global alliance that facilitates the use of trusted low-cost, flexible Freely licensed Open Source Software (FLOSS) within industries and governments, fuelling innovation and competitiveness. To meet this goal, QualiPSo intends to define and implement technologies, processes and policies to facilitate the development and use of FLOSS components, with the same level of trust traditionally offered by proprietary software. This will leverage the FLOSS development current practices to sound, well recognized and established industrial operations.
Keywords: FLOSS, Software Trustworthiness, Internet Platforms, Competence Centers, Software Quality.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. This work is partially funded by EU under the grant of IST-FP6034763.
Executive summary The present paper intends to summarize the common view of QualiPSo consortium on the current FLOSS (Freely licensed Open Source Software) situation and how QualiPSo is contributing to leverage the FLOSS for fostering its adoption by the industry, being sure that this will have an impact on the economy growth. The document firstly analyses the economical context in the ICT domain where FLOSS may contribute. Then, it enumerates the main economical factors that could foster FLOSS adoption in this context. Next, some pending drawbacks that prevent from FLOSS adoption are listed. Following, QualiPSo project is described in terms of objectives and work. Finally, the industrial board of the consortium endorses the present document as a declaration of intention for supporting and promoting FLOSS.
Open source in the ICT economical context The ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) economy is more and more based on services rather than on products. FLOSS is a perfect instrument to accelerate the adoption of this new paradigm for software development. Some of the intrinsic features of the FLOSS favour a rapid transition from a product-based model to a service-based model and allow the appropriate adaptation to the current eco-system and business model around ICT. According to some relevant studies, such as the O’Reilly report Open Source Paradigm Shift1, there are some reasons to support this assertion: -
The trend for software commoditization, since the software itself is not the major value for the industry, but the services that this software can offer.
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The network-enable collaboration, since the network allows the easy collaboration among contributors worldwide distributed to build more ambitious and qualified open software.
Factors that foster open source adoption The globalization of the economy and businesses make that every time more people must work geographically distributed to reach common objectives or to achieve cooperative businesses. The FLOSS provides effective processes and tools to work in such distributed environments. The service-based economy is growing rapidly and is the major source of income for many IT companies. FLOSS business model is based on services provision around certain software: legacy and business consultancy, maintenance and support, software benchmarking, integration of solutions, customization and packaging, software localization, etc. Periodic economic crisis happen in cycles and affects business at worldwide level. In these periods, countries and companies need to find alternative ways of generating business and saving costs. Innovation represents then a competitive factor that may help to recover earlier from the negative situation. FLOSS may contribute to increase the competiveness offering services at a lower cost and with a shorter time to market. As more and more business processes are spanning multiple administrative and organisational domains, the aspect of ICT interoperability has become a crucial competitive factor. In particular this is true for the FLOSS domain, which by nature is 1
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/paradigmshift_0504.html
characterised through vendor independence, competitiveness and a high diversity of software and actors. The FLOSS spirit of openness and collaboration has proved to be beneficial for the creation and adoption of open standards. Transparency and disclosure are inherent to open source. Software is open to inspection. Openness leads to transparent technology access of systems and services and greater control of business relationships for the users.
Drawbacks still unsolved There are significant signs of broad dissemination of FLOSS concepts. Major Industry players from IBM to Nokia consider today FLOSS as part of their R&D operations. European Community including national governments and European Commission, consider also FLOSS as a key opportunity for the development of an independent Software Industry in Europe. The recent and strong commitment of Brazil, Japan, India and China’s governmental organizations highlights the key importance of FLOSS in their independent development in the modern digital age. Nevertheless, there is still reluctance to massive adoption of FLOSS development mainly due to lack of confidence. The “grey areas” of FLOSS which cause major concerns to the Industry sector are mainly legal aspects such as IP protection or indemnification. The Industry sector is also concerned by quality aspects such as development life cycle, documentation, support, reliability and performances; and finally by business issues, for instance, business models capable of guaranteeing sustainability. All these concerns can be easily summarised in one word: TRUST. And trust is not a quality which can be claimed without being proved. It also relies on perception, on non technical questions such as “who is behind FLOSS?”, “why to be confident in FLOSS?”, “if something goes wrong, against who having to point the finger?”, or even “how to be confident in FLOSS?” Despite the FLOSS has a deep penetration in the academic domain and in some market niches, other industrial domains are still reluctant to use FLOSS software products or services or to adopt FLOSS processes as usual software production environment. There are still many persistent myths and unsolved drawbacks that prevent the industry from being confident on FLOSS products and benefits. Some of these unsolved issues and grey areas are currently studied and taken on by the QualiPSo project. QualiPSo is in fact addressing: -
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Evaluation of legal risk. Intellectual property issues require a clarification and simplification of the licensing matter. It is worth noticing that the selection of the FLOSS license has an impact on the business model, and many times the selection of a concrete business model implies adopting a specific type of license. Assessment of the FLOSS product and development process quality. The selection of the most suitable FLOSS product according to the industrial needs that ensures the required set of qualities is not an easy task and needs supporting criteria and tools. On the other side, the peculiarities of FLOSS development processes require a specific definition of a maturity model for industrialization of FLOSS. Proposals for mitigating the sustainability risk. The Industry sector is normally adopting existing business models to make profitable their software
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use and development. FLOSS introduces a new paradigm of making business that brings new business models or modifications over the existing ones. Coexistence with proprietary software. Open and closed (proprietary) software need to live together. This introduces some areas of conflict: the cost of migration and skill transfers from established close solutions to open solutions, the integration and interoperability between closed and open source software, legal aspects, trustworthiness, and solutions (services) and products evolution/availability.
What is QualiPSo? In order to address the above mentioned issues and others related to them, the QualiPSo initiative was conceived. QualiPSo is an Integrated Project (IP) co-funded by European Commission under the FP6 which aims at making a major contribution to the state of the art and practice of FLOSS. The goal of QualiPSo IP is to define and implement technologies, procedures and policies to leverage the FLOSS development current practices to sound and well recognized and established industrial operations. Eighteen worldwide companies and research groups (from Europe, Brazil and China) are working together in this 4-year project. The project brings together software companies, application solution developers and research institutions and is driven by the need for having for FLOSS the appropriated level of trust which makes FLOSS development an industrial and wide accepted practice.
How QualiPSo aim to reduce the factors that prevent the wide adoption of FLOSS? QualiPSo has collected scenarios and problems when integrating FLOSS into industrial systems. They contain legal aspects, technical aspects and further topics like economic benefits and business models. The technical aspects contain maintenance, quality and functional issues. The legal aspects focus on licenses, intellectual property of rights, trademarks and patents and export and customs control. The different QualiPSo working areas are dealing with the identified reluctant issues providing solutions and recommendations useful for the industry. QualiPSo results are listed below. The work is in progress although there are partial versions for all of them. The completion status will be reach by the end of 2010. The worldwide QualiPSo Competence Centres network The goal of the QualiPSo Network of Competence Centers is to provide to FLOSS users, developers, and consumers, high-quality resources and expertise on different topics related to open source software. This will be achieved via education, training, consulting, hosting, and certification, not only in terms of tools and platforms but also of methodologies, studies, and best practices. QualiPSo Competence Centers are federated in a Network that will work as a mechanism for sharing success stories, failures, questions, recommendations, best practices, and any kind of information that could help the establishment of a solid international collaborative environment for supporting quality in FLOSS. New competence centers can be admitted in the QualiPSo network after their proposals are evaluated by the QualiPSo Competence Centers Board to ensure that the prospective Competence Centre is compliant with the QualiPSo Network Agreement, sharing a common vision and ethics.
Each Competence Center will act in its geographical region to increase the awareness of FLOSS and to better prepare the IT workforce in developing and using open source solutions, based on the results of the QualiPSo project. The Competence Centres will put into practice the outcomes of the activities of the QualiPSo research project; they will make these results available both to the FLOSS community and to the industry and will promote them at large through communication and dissemination programs.
Today, there are three operative QualiPSo Competence Centers in Spain, Brazil and Germany. The Italian and the Chinese ones will be launched in the short term during 2009. In particular, here are the details for each Competence Centre today in activity:
Spanish Competence Centre Site o
Location: Madrid (Spain)
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Founders: GSyC/LibreSoft research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC), the CETTICO research group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and Telefonica R&D.
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Expected services:
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Main market addressed: MORFEO Community
Brazilian Competence Centre Site o
Location: Sao Paulo (Brazil)
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Founders: University of Sao Paulo
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Expected services: Sharing the knowledge developed by university research groups; working as a meeting point for students, researchers,
and practitioners from Sao Paulo region and abroad; to benefit from being part of an international collaborative network focusing on the quality of Free and Open Source Software. o
Main market addressed: University, software industry and society at Sao Paulo and Brazil.
German Competence Centre o
Location: Berlin (Germany)
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Founders: Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Sys-tems (FOKUS).
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Expected services: providing a factory for Free Open Source Software projects and on QualiPSo services in the context of technical, se-mantic, and organizational interoperability between Free Open Source systems as well as between Free Open Source systems and Closed Source systems
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Main market addressed: German Public Administration
FLOSS Legal Portal A practical web portal to address legal issues related to FLOSS will be able to cover the expectations and needs of several countries. The portal will hosts a lawyers’ community, a repository of legal resources and best practices in legal matters. This portal is addressed to lawyers to share knowledge, developers to check compatibility of their code licenses and managers to decide which license is suitable for their business model. The final goal is to reach a better understanding and confidence of FLOSS issues. Interoperability QualiPSo provides and demonstrates approaches and components fostering interoperability across borders of any kind - technical, semantic and organizational. Test scenarios, test environments and test methodologies have been developed and implemented in order to identify open issues and potential enhancements concerning technical interoperability between FLOSS products and FLOSS middleware platforms as well as between open and closed source software. Achieving semantic interoperability today is seen as one of the biggest challenges for the integration of information systems. As part of the QualiPSo project, semantic integration approaches have been identified and several semantic interoperability enhancements (proof-of-concepts) for FLOSS middleware platforms and FLOSS forges have been developed. For organizational interoperability, the result will be the evaluation of Open Source tools for the modeling and implementation of cross-organizational business processes and the provision of guidelines for enhancing organizational interoperability using FLOSS.
The “searcher” of forges This is a semantic repository containing the information on every project of the forges. The repository allows a unique view over every project. Tools for retrieving and improve the information contained in a forge. Friendly and graphical semantic browser to visualize project related information inside the forge that resides in the repository. Semantic search over the repository at different levels of information (bugs, emails, people, etc). This facility is extremely useful for industrial developers to exploit knowledge form FLOSS communities and their forges. The Open Maturity Model (OMM) This capability maturity model is a CMMI-like model compatible with it, but adapted to the specificities of FLOSS. The Competence Centres will certify the enterprises according to this model, that can reach up to 3-level. Some tools will be provided for supporting the model helping in the process. Customizable product trustworthiness model The primary goal of the customizable product trustworthiness model is to help companies and practitioners assess and select FLOSS products according to some factors of trust, based on specific needs and goals. Also, the model can be used by communities to assess and improve their own FLOSS products and also promote their use. The model is based on a number of product and process factors that influence software product trustworthiness. The model is being built in a practical way, by carrying our research and experimentation on the field. The relative importance of these factors has been assessed by interviewing FLOSS stakeholders; the impact of the factors on trustworthiness and its aspects (e.g., reliability, maintainability) is assessed via experiments. Also, tools are being built to automate as much as possible the burden of collecting measures to quantify these trustworthiness factors. The next generation FLOSS forge The problems of current forges are mainly due to high coupling between components. Our approach is to apply Service Oriented Architecture [SOA] principles to the forge design to reduce maintenance costs and improve forge evolution. The QualiPSo Factory proposes an open service oriented integration framework with well-defined interfaces between the components which facilitate integration of further services and integration with the corporate information system. It does not only display the projects, but also proposes tools for information exchange since the existence of distributed teams lead to a significant need for image associated with the project especially to reinforce the feeling of being involved in a group. The Factory offers services combining both development and information sharing aspects. This first release includes the following tools: Forum, VoIP, calendar, version control system, issue tracker, document management and skills management. Core services such as notification, security, search, indexation, etc are factorized in a middle layer to abstract them from the tools. This release implements access control, binding, projects management, groups and user profiles management.
The user interface provided with the QualiPSo Factory is based on a mashup platform. The QualiPSo Factory addresses needs for advance collaborative infrastructure in IT industry providing the necessary environment and tools to support collaborative development, as well as, facilitating the adoption of open source components. Software development can no longer be conceived without monitoring of the documentation, management of the IPR, of the testing process, and the project community life. Handling properly such factors contributes towards increasing the trustworthiness in the resulting software. The clear advantage of the Factory is the complete solution provided, starting from pure development support, to general collaboration and communication, in single and secured virtual workspaces. Users at large will benefit from the advance quality and trust-level of the developed software. FLOSS Business Models There is a trend in the industry which defines a clear path with Open Standards & FLOSS. This has created new opportunities and generated thousands of companies making business directly or indirectly with FLOSS. There are no limits for FLOSS Strategies and Business Models but now it’s possible to identify the more significant and speculate about new possibilities. QualiPSo provides a brief analysis and identification of FLOSS Strategies & Business Models which will allow readers to understand how they can make money with FLOSS.
FLOSS Training Courses and Materials The objectives of QualiPSo training courses are to promote and encourage uptake of the emerging QualiPSo results helping the potential target groups to better understand and exploit the methodological and technological aspects, the tools and the overall environment defined and developed, and the knowledge in terms of best-practices, business models, experience gained in the project scenarios development and more in general in the adoption of OSS. According with this view, training is orthogonal to the activities performed in QualiPSo and, then, the courses presented in the “Training” section of the QualiPSo web site can be classified as follows: •
Concepts and Models: this category includes courses explaining basic concepts related to OSS
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Methodologies: Courses belonging to this category describe methodologies to be applied for effective use of OSS or more in general to actualize the basic concepts
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Technical: technical courses are related to technical content that is directly related to QualiPSo outcomes (e.g. tools, design, etc) or that is exploit to achieve QualiPSo objectives
The following table summarizes relations between published courses and categories. Category
Courses
Concepts and Models
Organizational Interoperability (OI), Business Models (BM)
Methodologies
Interoperability Testing (IT), CMMI-like Model (CMMI), Technical Interoperability State of the Art (TI-SOTA)
Technical
Qualipso Interoperability Guidelines (QIG), Technical Interoperability Hands On (TIHO), Semantic Navigator (SN), Semantic Search (SS)
The proposed courses are intended to be enjoined by beginners target groups that have a basic experience in OSS and ICT in general. In any case it is possible to identify two types of target groups: •
conceptual level: more interested in understanding the overall problems and potential solutions (they will enjoy concepts, models, and methodologies related courses)
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technical level: interested in more in depth understanding of Qualipso results (they will enjoy Methodologies and Technical Courses.
The presented courses are self-consistent, in any case, the following diagram shows possible paths of training.
Endorsement declaration of the industrial board In this document QualiPSo consortium shares the offered view on the current status of FLOSS, already existing drawbacks and potential solutions that the project results will provide during and after its completion. According to the main objective of the project, “leveraging FLOSS for boosting industrial growth”, the commitment of the industrial partners of the consortium in the promotion and supporting of QualiPSo initiative in particular, and FLOSS, in general, is essential for ensuring the actual and definitive adoption of FLOSS in industrial environments. The results of QualiPSo are evidences that support the partners’ commitment. QualiPSo industrial bodies are committed to influence policy makers for continuously promoting and fostering laws and regulations to favour the FLOSS adoption as an innovative and alternative way of growth in society and industry. This Position Paper is formally endorsed and signed by representatives of the QualiPSo Project.
Conclusions and perspectives FLOSS is a great and powerful opportunity for industrial growth. However some open issues still prevent industry for its complete and broader adoption and trust. QualiPSo wants to provide evidences and instruments to demolish old myths; to solve the drawbacks; and to offer FLOSS services for an integrated and cooperating community. This document highlights the commitment of QualiPSo industrial partners in the promotion and support of FLOSS, and the confidence on QualiPSo results.
