“Market research firm VisionMobile has published a report that evaluates the openness of eight major open source software projects,” Ryan Paul reports for Ars Technica. “The study—which was partly funded by the European Union—focuses largely on open governance, inclusiveness, transparency, and ease of access to source code. To quantify relative openness, the researchers established criteria and a numerical rating system with points.”
“The projects that VisionMobile analyzed include Android, Eclipse, the Linux kernel, MeeGo, Firefox, Qt, Symbian (based on the governance model of the Symbian Foundation prior to the the platform’s transition back to a closed model), and WebKit,” Paul reports. “They ranked these projects in an “open governance index” based on the percentage of points that they received.”
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Paul reports, “Google’s Android mobile operating system ranked the lowest, with only 23 percent. The Eclipse integrated development environment ranked the highest, with 84 percent. Android was the only project in the study that scored less than 58 percent… WebKit had a slightly higher score (68 percent) than Firefox (65 percent).”
Read more in the full article here.