CrOSSD

CrOSSD

Towards a Critical Open-Source Software Database

The research project CrOSSD aims to create a database of OSS projects and evaluate their "health" status using both quantitative and qualitative metrics.

Open source software (OSS) is used in countless companies and public agencies, however, there is currently no efficient way to view or automatically check the health of OSS.

Our goal is to assess the status quo regarding the "health" of (especially: critical) OSS projects and make a contribution to the transparent and critical evaluation of open-source software.

How does it work?

Quantitative & qualitative metrics are to be applied:

  • Quantitative & automated: Crawling of meta-information (e.g. contributors, commits, activity), analysis of dependencies.
  • Qualitative: sustainability/funding, activity indicators, security policies, etc.

The results will provide a comprehensive view of the health of OSS projects, making it easier for developers, maintainers and stakeholders to make informed decisions.

This project is funded via netidee 2022: https://www.netidee.at/crossd

open source

Project Architecture

CrOSSD architecture

Our architecture consists of several components:

Data collection

Gathers metadata from various sources such as code-hosting platforms, financial reports, and community engagement data.

Metrics assessment

Analyzes the collected data and generates scores reflecting the health of OSS projects in different domains.

Project health database

Continuously monitors and updates the metrics assessment.

Integration & UI

Results are displayed on a user-friendly web platform, planned integration with other tools and platforms.

OSS Health

  • Quantitative and qualitative metrics
  • Crawling of meta-information (such as contributors and commits)
  • Analysis of dependencies on other software projects
  • Sustainability and/or existing funding
  • Compliance with security policies

Results

  • Concept for assessing the health of OSS projects.
  • Platform that provides continuous monitoring and evaluation of the metrics of a corpus of OSS projects.

Publications

Tobias Dam, Lukas Daniel Klausner, and Sebastian Neumaier. 2023. Towards a Critical Open-Source Software Database. In Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (WWW '23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 156–159. https://doi.org/10.1145/3543873.3587336
Tobias Dam and Sebastian Neumaier. 2023. Towards Measuring Vulnerabilities and Exposures in Open-Source Packages. Proceedings of the 5th International Data Science Conference - iDSC2023. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.14527