Managing Quality in the Free and Open Source Software Community

The Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) paradigm has attracted much attention in the past few years. Software developed by the community is considered to be a serious rival to proprietary software developed by commercial organizations. While the adoption levels of F/OSS artifacts within the community are quite high, end users from outside the community are still skeptical about adopting F/OSS. Claims against the adoption of F/OSS are usually rooted in the apparent lack of quality assurance mechanisms required to guarantee the protection of users' interests. This paper aims to promote higher adoption of F/OSS artifacts outside the developers' community by exploring possibilities to provide appropriate assurances that F/OSS artifacts will meet the quality levels expected by users