O'Reilly European Open Source Convention - 17-20 October, 2005

Session
Business Readiness Rating for Open Source Software
Tony Wasserman, Executive Director, Carnegie Mellon West Center for Open Source Investigation
Murugan Pal, Founder & CTO, SpikeSource

Track: Business
Date: Thursday, 20 October 2005
Time: 14:20 - 15:05
Location: Amsterdam Room
Though open source software has been touted as a cost-savings alternative to expensive, sometimes monopolistic proprietary solutions, businesses remain understandably wary about the risks of deploying unproven applications not held to any kind of industry standard. In this session, the speakers will discuss Business Readiness Rating (BRR), a new open source industry standard proposed by Carnegie Mellon West Center for Open Source Investigation and supported by several well-known private sector companies, including Intel. They will describe the framework BRR uses to calibrate the business readiness of open software, and explain how BRR can offer enterprise IT departments a trusted, unbiased way to determine whether specific open source software meets their business needs. They will show how BRR can also be used by open source developers to demonstrate assurance about the business readiness of the open source software they develop. The model provides a way for developers and companies to share their adoption criteria and their deployment and usage experience.