Free and open source software such as the Firefox browser and the Apache web server has often been presented as an inexpensive alternative to expensive proprietary software. However, many businesses have been reluctant to adopt open source software, partly because they have not had a good way to identify those products that are suitable for widespread use and there is no way to evaluate based on operational support information such as bug resolution metrics. The Business Readiness Rating (BRR) has been developed as a framework for the evaluation the business readiness of open software, based in large part on metrics available from the project itself. There have been numerous activities following BRR's introduction as a proposed industry standard in August 2005, including formation of a community to help develop the BRR and manage its evolution, the adoption of a software taxonomy, and initial work toward the creation of tools for automated data collection on open source projects.

This session presents the basic concepts and goals of the BRR, including a description of the evaluation framework, an example of its use, status of the community-building effort, and enumeration of opportunities for
volunteer involvement.