Beyond Total Cost of Ownership: Applying Balanced Scorecards to Open-Source Software

Potential users of Open Source Software (OSS) face the problem of evaluating OSS, in order to assess the convenience of adopting OSS instead of commercial software, or to choose among different OSS proposals. Different metrics were defined, addressing different OSS properties: the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) addresses the cost of acquiring, adapting and operating OSS; the Total Account Ownership (TAO) represents the degree of freedom of the user with respect to the technology provider; indexes like the Open Business Quality Rating (Open BQR) assess the quality of the software with respect to the user's needs. However, none of the proposed methods and models addresses all the aspects of OSS in a balanced and complete way. For this purpose, the paper explores the possibility of adapting the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) technique to OSS. A preliminary definition of the BSC for OSS is given and discussed.