Selecting software

From OpenEGov

The extra degree of freedom involved with free software means that more choices have to be made than when evaluating proprietary software. This page discusses some of these choices. Another page on this theme can be found on the OpenAdvantage site (Open Advantage are funded by the Regional Development Agency for the West Midlands and can provide free advice on this and related topics).

In practical terms, many of the issues arise from the motivation of the original developers of the software. These might be a small software house looking to position themselves as a service company; an individual expert with a personal - but generally usable - product; a larger company using free software as a competitive tactic in a field dominated by a near monopolist; an international team of developers working on software with a worldwide reputation; or developers from other government (or even other countries' government) departments. The range of possibilities is large, and so is the corresponding range of motivations. These will impact on an evaluation of several aspects of the software, including:

• Code quality
• Availability of documentation
• Speed of project development
• License
• Scale and growth of community
• Degree of adaptation needed for proposed use
• Availability of support

The first stage is to search for available software. One common starting point is sourceforge but such development sites include many projects in their very early stages or abandoned; a better starting point is probably Freshmeat which aggregates lists of free software which have generally reached a reasonable degree of maturity (Freshmeat also lists some proprietary software, but this is clearly labelled).

to be continued