Weighing the value of changeability in Open Source Software

Software value assessment is not an easy task. Many techniques have been proposed in the past, qualitative and quantitative, based on human evaluation or on measureable metrics. This paper proposes a quantitative technique based on the concept that “modularization is value”, applied to the Debian package database. This (software implemented) technique defines two metrics: change cost (as a function of the dependencies among packages) and integration cost (as a function of the number of maintainers involved). We applied our technique to sets of packages and we show and comment the results we obtained.