Is your software open or fauxpen?

This is the question that OSS Watch, in partnership with Pia Waugh, developed the Openness Rating to help you find out.

Using a series of questions covering legal issues, governance, standards, knowledge sharing and market access, the tool helps you to identify potential problem areas for users, contributors and partners.

Unlike earlier models designed to evaluate open source projects, this model can also be applied to both open and closed source software products.

We’ve used the Openness Rating internally at OSS Watch for several years as a key part of our consultancy work, but this is the first time we’ve made the app itself open for anyone to use. It requires a fair bit of knowledge to get the most out of it, but even at a basic level its useful for highlighting questions that a project needs to be able to answer.

Get started with the Openness Rating tool.

Photo by Alan Levine used under CC-BY-SA.