Industry, SMEs, public administrations and individuals are increasingly relying on libre (free, open source) software as a competitive advantage in the globalising, service-oriented software economy. But they need detailed, reliable and complete information about libre software, specifically about its development process, its productivity and the quality of its results. They need to know how to benchmark individual projects against the general level. And they need to know how to learn from, and adapt, the methods of collaborative, distributed, agile development found in libre software to their own development processes, especially within industry.

FLOSSMETRICS addresses those needs by analysing a large quantity (thousands) of libre software projects, using already proven techniques and tools. This analysis will provide detailed quantitative data about the development process, development actors, and developed artifacts of those projects, their evolution over time, and benchmarking parameters to compare projects. Several aspects of libre software development (software evolution, human resources coordination, effort estimation, productivity, quality, etc.) will be studied in detail.

The main results of FLOSSMETRICS will be: a huge database with factual details about all the studied projects; some higher level analysis and studies which will help to understand how libre software is actually developed; and a sustainable platform for continued, publicly available benchmarking and analysis beyond the lifetime of this project. With these results, European industry, SMEs, as well as public administrations and individuals will be able to take informed decisions about how to benefit from the competitive advantage of libre software, either as a development process or in the evaluation and choosing of individual software applications.