Software Quality in Open Source Software Ecosystems

growing research literature, OSS has garnered much support in the software community. Indeed, from the early days of GNU software, to X Window System, to Linux and its utilities, and more recently the Apache Software Project, OSS has changed the way software is developed and used. As the deployment of OSS increases, the issue of its quality with respect to its stakeholders arises. We contend that the open source community collectively bears responsibility of producing “high-quality” OSS. Lack of quality raises various risks for organizations adopting OSS (Golden, 2004). This article discusses the manifestation of quality in open source software development (OSSD) from a traditional software engineering standpoint.