Open Source Software (OSS) communities do not often invest in marketing strategies to promote their products in a competitive way. Even the home pages of the web portals of well-known OSS products show technicalities and details that are not relevant for a fast and effective evaluation of the product’s qualities. So, final users and even developers who are interested in evaluating and potentially adopting an OSS product are often negatively impressed by the quality perception they have from the web portal of the product and turn to proprietary software solutions or fail to adopt OSS that may be useful in their activities. In this paper, we define OP2A, an evaluation model and we derive a checklist that OSS developers and web masters can use to design (or improve) their web portals with all the contents that are expected to be of interest for OSS final users. We exemplify the use of the model by applying it to the Apache Tomcat web portal and we apply the model to 47 web sites of well-known OSS products to highlight the current deficiencies that characterize these web portals.

OP2A: How to Improve the Quality of the Web Portal of Open Source Software Products

LAVAZZA, LUIGI ANTONIO;MORASCA, SANDRO;TAIBI, DAVIDE;TOSI, DAVIDE
2012-01-01

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) communities do not often invest in marketing strategies to promote their products in a competitive way. Even the home pages of the web portals of well-known OSS products show technicalities and details that are not relevant for a fast and effective evaluation of the product’s qualities. So, final users and even developers who are interested in evaluating and potentially adopting an OSS product are often negatively impressed by the quality perception they have from the web portal of the product and turn to proprietary software solutions or fail to adopt OSS that may be useful in their activities. In this paper, we define OP2A, an evaluation model and we derive a checklist that OSS developers and web masters can use to design (or improve) their web portals with all the contents that are expected to be of interest for OSS final users. We exemplify the use of the model by applying it to the Apache Tomcat web portal and we apply the model to 47 web sites of well-known OSS products to highlight the current deficiencies that characterize these web portals.
2012
Springer
9783642280825
File in questo prodotto:
Non ci sono file associati a questo prodotto.

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11383/1759052
 Attenzione

L'Ateneo sottopone a validazione solo i file PDF allegati

Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus 4
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? 3
social impact