QualiPSo: EU OSS and Acronym Madness

This sounds great:

Leading European, Brazilian and Chinese information and communications technology (ICT) players announced today that they have joined forces to launch QualiPSo, a quality platform to foster the development and use of open source software to help their industries in the global race for growth.

The aim of QualiPSo is to help industries and governments fuel innovation and competitiveness in today’s and tomorrow’s global environment by providing the way to use trusted low-cost, flexible open source software to develop innovative and reliable information systems. To meet that goal, QualiPSo will define and implement the technologies, processes and policies to facilitate the development and use of open source software components, with the same level of trust traditionally offered by proprietary software.

Er, yes, and how will it do that?

Developing a long-lasting network of professionals caring for the quality of open source software for enterprise computing. Six Competence Centres – running the collaborative platforms, tools and process developed in this project – will be set up to support the development, deployment and adoption of OSS by private and public Information Systems Departments, large companies, SMEs, end users and ISVs.

Yes, yes, yes, and that will be done how?

Defining methods, development processes, and business models to facilitate the use of open source Software (OSS) by the industry.

Can't they just get stuck in and try it - you know, download, install, give it a go? Anything else?

Developing a new Capability Maturity Model-like approach to assessing the quality of OSS. This model will be discussed with CMM’s originators, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), with a view to formalising it as an official extension of CMMI.

What? Maturity? What's this got to do with getting people to use the ruddy stuff?

QualiPSo is launched in synergy with Europe’s technology initiatives such as NESSI and Artemis, and will leverage Europe’s existing OSS initiatives such as EDOS, FLOSSWorld (http://flossworld.org/), tOSSad (http://www.tossad.org/) and others. The project will also leverage large OSS communities such as OW2 and Morfeo.

Oh, now I see: all this is just an excuse for more acronym madness. So it's basically just a waste of money, and a missed opportunity to do something practical.

But wait:

QualiPSo is the ever largest Open Source initiative funded by the EC.

OK, make that the biggest waste of money, and biggest missed opportunity yet.

Why couldn't they invest in a few hundred open source start-ups across Europe instead? Or, easier still, simply mandate ODF for all EU government documents? That single act alone would jump-start an entire open source economy in Europe. (Via Open Source Weblog.)

FOOGL (Firefox, OpenOffice.org, GNU/Linux) Usability

First, we had the hugely-important, but horribly-named "Economic impact of FLOSS on innovation and competitiveness of the EU ICT sector" report, and now we have the equally horribly-named tOSSad F/OSS Usability report.

Since this is actually about Firefox, OpenOffice.org and GNU/Linux, they should, of course, have called it the FOOGL Usability Report. Despite this monumental gaffe, it does include some very useful information about usability, traditionally viewed as free software's Achilles Heel:

The survey showed that the majority of respondents agree that all three products have sufficient number of features and are user-friendly in general. Among the positive features of Firefox and OpenOffice.org are their user-friendly graphical interfaces. These include menus with clear definitions and abbreviations, and logical navigation of the main and context menus. OpenOffice.org and Firefox was also considered to have a sufficient set of features and are easy to install.

Regarding GNU/Linux, the survey results show that in average there is a positive opinion among the survey respondents in terms of installation, information presentation, navigation and the overall impression from the operating system. Therefore it can be concluded that the more experience users have with GNU/Linux, the more positive is their opinion of it.

However, respondents also mentioned gaps in the usability area of these products. For some users, one of the GNU/Linux’s disadvantages is the difficulty of installation of hardware and the learning curve needed in the process of migration from the MS Windows interface. OpenOffice.org also has some issues with insufficient performance compared to MS Office, according to the respondents.

Apart from sole usability aspects, the survey discovered that there is a need for more information about which F/OSS programs represent alternatives to their commercial counterparts. The survey also showed that no charge and the GNU General Public License (GPL) remain the main reasons for switching to F/OSS products.

(Via Erwin Tenhumberg.)