Rating of small and medium open source product and service firms

Abstract

As we mentioned above from our research that there is no perfect definition for open source vendor. All firms who support and provide support for open source software shouldn’t be called open source vendors. Only those firms who work with open source code and develop something like a customization or plug-in should be termed as open source vendor for example companies who are directly involved in fully open source development like RedHat, Ubuntu etc or companies who build customization on top of open source product like MacSync, Zestard etc. Open source community contribution is an important parameter. But that shouldn’t be the deciding parameter. While choosing the open source service/support provider we should use existing frameworks available for vendor evaluation and then if there are more than one firm, then we can see their contribution to open source community which enhances the expertise level.