Open source software is the generic name for both a legal construct to share intellectual property and an approach to cooperative software development. While this approach has demonstrated its ability to produce world-class software, the potential benefits and efficiencies of open source are not, however, always achieved, indeed, far from it. Publishing code is not enough to develop a community of developers and only a minority of open source projects actually make it to stardom. This is certainly why open source remains a challenge for many IT professionals who still prefer to see the downside of open source.
Project Objectives
Objective 1: Support market take-up of EU-supported open source projects. AppHub will provide a distribution channel to facilitate the connection between EU-supported open source projects and their potential markets.
Objective 2: Support EU-supported open source projects and open source SMEs. With AppHub, the aim is to extend OW2 into a state-of-the art European community platform for open source projects.
Objective 3: Improve professionalism of EU-supported open source projects. The objective here is to help EU-supported project gain better market acceptance by being more professional and efficient in their open source strategies.
Objective 4: Facilitate international cooperation. The objective here is to enhance the ability of EU-supported open source projects to take advantage of international cooperation opportunities by helping them to position themselves center-stage in the global market.
Project Strategy
The overall strategy employed by the AppHub project to achieve these objectives is illustrated in Figure "AppHub project strategy". It is based on the Open Source Charter as focal point guiding the project objectives. The charter consists of a set of commitments regarding software quality and open source governance principles that projects producing open source software shall be accept and implement in order to produce software of sufficient quality to be useful for the European market.
We have further developed a set of best practices and guidelines will help projects to implement the commitments of the charter. To provide projects with a dissemination channel, the AppHub Marketplace has been developed. This platform allows projects to showcase their products (called “assets” in the following) by projects in order to connect with potential users and customers.
Having a set of tools and guidelines ready, the next step is to define and perform concrete steps to use these to support OSS projects. For this, the AppHub project will provide a number of workshops. In addition to physical events, a number of screencasts will be provided on various topics, including an introduction to the OW2 collection on quality tools.
Support activities are complemented by validation activities. These will be based on a series of online questionnaires. In addition, the final event of the AppHub project will be devoted to impact assessment (see above).
Technical Approach
The aim of the AppHub project is to support the market outreach strategies of EU-supported open source by launching AppHub, the European Open Source Marketplace. AppHub is a service platform that will help the market to seamlessly identify, position and implement the software outcomes of these projects. The partners that will develop, run and promote AppHub over this two-year project and beyond combine unparalleled expertise in open source community management, EU research projects and a breakthrough technology in software asset management.
AppHub will be based on three interrelated services:
(1) The AppHub Directory allows placing software assets as part of a reference architecture and thus identifying rapidly ways to compose various open source assets into a service architecture.
(2) The AppHub Factory lets users build and maintain full software stacks as templates using a visual "point and click" interface or APIs.
(3) The AppHub Store provides users with self-service access to pre-packaged business and IT applications via a customizable, white-labelled app store, and to deploy them in various cloud infrastructures.
