Brennan’s Blog

The folks over at Carnegie Mellon University have partnered with Intel and SpikeSource to produce a website to track the business readiness of Open Source projects. You can find Open Business Readiness Rating at OpenBRR.org.

I hope this website really takes off. A rating system like this could really allow the good Open Source projects to gain some much needed credibility in the business world when compared to less worthy commercial products.

Back in the day when I worked with Perl to create web applications with CGI I use to dig through so many modules on CPAN, only to find 5 implementations for sending mail or 3 different XML parsers, not knowing which one was most complete or robust without learning the hard way. A readiness rating would have been useful. Sure a version number does provide some indication, but that is an assessment from the project developers and not the business community.

It may even be possible to make the argument that you should move all of your development to your language/framework of choice by comparing the ratings for it against the others. And it may just work because the suits do not have to take your word for it. They can read the reviews from suits at other companies. This new website will just have to safeguard the credibility of the rating system first.