QualiPSo

The first international consortium focused on OSS quality, the QualiPSo consortium has been founded to help industries and governments fuel innovation and competitiveness by providing the way to use trusted low-cost, flexible Open Source Software to develop innovative and reliable information systems. To meet this goal, QualiPSo intends to 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.

Founded by a heavyweight group of ICT players, across three continents, QualiPSo brings together large IT integrators, industry groups, telecoms players, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), academics and government organizations from Europe, Brazil and China. It is also the largest ever Open Source initiative funded by the European Commission, as part of its Information Society Technologies (IST) initiative.

The QualiPSo consortium is carrying out research and development in seven key areas:

• Defining business models to facilitate the use of OSS in the industry
• Simplifying OSS legal environments
• Streamlining global interoperability of OSS solutions
• Implementing best practices in OSS information management
• Defining trustworthy quality processes for OSS
• Building next-generation software forges for OSS: the QualiPSo Factory
• Setting up OSS International Competence Centers