A number of European research institutions and open source software companies have launched a project to manage complexity in open source software.
Called the Environment for the Development and Distribution of Free Software or EDOS, it will research and implement new ways to manage the complexity. The team includes six research and academic institutions and four software and services companies.
EDOS will receive €2.2 million in funding from the European Union and has a total budget of €3.4 million. The project has a lifetime of 2½ years.
Two applications are planned. One will deal with the build process and will be a distributed, peer-to-peer application, designed to aid the integration of the many software parts that make up a Linux system.
The second deals with quality testing and EDOS will aim to develop tools to make testing more efficient and more comprehensive as free software lacks a test suite that is both automatic and comprehensive.
The software which is developed will be released under an open source licence and theoretical results will be published in scientific journals as advances are made.
The participating organisations are:
Research and Academic Institutions
- INRIA, France (Project Coordinator)
- University of Paris 7, France
- Tel-Aviv University, Israel
- University of Geneva, Switzerland
- University of Zürich, Switzerland
- CSP Torino, Italy
- Edge-IT, France, a Mandrakesoft subsidiary (Project Manager)
- NUXEO, France
- NEXEDI, France
- SOT, Finland