A Framework for Free and Open Source Software Best Practices

Abstract

We explore a new modern software trends Free and Open Source Software FOSS projects which provide the software industry with a new way for developing software and typically have faced and solved some of the software developing challenges, because of their benefits and advantages. We started investigating the existing methodologies that have been applied and followed to develop FOSS software, we have reviewed the best practices and findings related to this approach, finally propose a framework inspired from strategies of some corporations that previously adopt and developed OSS, As partial work to meet the needs of developing FOSS software with clarifications of what phase's activities and participants needed to undergo on the right direction. Our achievement in this report is designing FOSS framework that have been compared with Mozilla's Organization framework for developing their OSS web browser in order to validate it. FOSS framework has covered some areas of defects and proposed a new way for classifying the participants and related assigned roles with ability to adopt it at the commercial environments. It recommended some issues for future work that include; what requirement needed to adopt FOSS in Sudan? Is it possible to benefit from adopting FOSS projects in such developing countries? How to reduce the potential adoption overhead, Mozilla framework seems to be similar to FOSS framework in different areas, it recommended to make a validation with other different existing frameworks such as apache web server.