Creating a Healthy Open-Source Landscape

With their project “CrOSSD” (Towards a Critical Open-Source Software Database), researchers of the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences are working on developing a database that identifies important and critical Open-Source Software (OSS) projects and assesses their current “health status” through automated analyses. The project was awarded the “innovative Projektförderung” (support for innovative projects) by netidee.

Support Decisions for Selecting Open-Source Software

Open-Source Software (OSS) is used in countless companies and public institutions. At the moment, there is no efficient way of examining or automatically checking the “health status” of OSS. The project CrOSSD is supposed to change this. Its objective is to establish a database that provides information on the “health status” of existing OSS projects. The project managers at the Institute of IT Security Research of the St. Pölten UAS – Tobias Dam, Lukas Daniel Klausner, and Sebastian Neumaier – see their efforts as a contribution to the transparent and critical assessment of OSS projects. Their platform CrOSSD is to be used as an aid in the decision-making process.

“With our results, we want to help both the Open-Source community and external stakeholders (such as funding and government bodies as well as companies with an interest in a thriving OSS landscape) to decide which projects to support or use”, explains Lukas Daniel Klausner.

Health Check for Open-Source Software

The first step in the development of the database is to ascertain the status quo regarding the “health” of particularly critical OSS projects. This “health status” is to be defined by various metrics such as the number of contributors, sustainable/existing financing, or compliance with security standards. The purpose of CrOSSD is to support OSS projects in assessing their own “health”. Institutions and funding providers can also benefit from this as critical OSS projects receive resources for their stable and resilient development.

“Our goal is to create a database of OSS projects along with project “health” assessments and analyses”, emphasises Sebastian Neumaier.

netidee Project Funding

For their innovative project CrOSSD, the researchers received one of the much sought-after funding contracts from netidee. The promotional programme netidee is the biggest Internet funding campaign in Austria. It provides support for projects that create effective impulses for the further development and use of the Internet to support positive social development.

Further information on the project CrOSSD

• Project website: https://crossd.tech
• netidee: https://www.netidee.at/crossd