FSFE and promoting software quality

[Bernhard E. Reiter]

Hi Vitaly,

Am Mittwoch 17 Februar 2021 09:25:29 schrieb Vitaly Repin:
> I think that FSFE can focus on promoting open source as a way to improve
> software quality.

this is one of the aspects FSFE promotes for the reasons you have outlined.

If we come up with other practical guidelines, even for code, why not?
I considered the GNU coding standards as maintained by FSFE's US based sister
organisation useful https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/index.html
and a capture of conventions that are still helpful today.

(Of course, they had a focus, to build the GNU system consistently. Still they 
are useful beyond this.)

AS FSFE lives a lot from volunteer work, if a group of volunteers would make 
the case for practical guides for creating good Free Software, I guess that 
FSFE would most likely support it.

But back to "promoting software quality":

> What practically can be done?
>
> Couple of ideas:
>
> - FSFE quality award to the open source software projects (based on the
> objective metrics - lint, coverity, relative defects amount etc)

The includes the challenge to get meatures for quality first. In the 
definitions I ran across lint and code coverage are not a good measure.
Again our sister has some nice awards: https://www.fsf.org/awards

> - Educational track. Promote open source as a way to create quality
> software. Online courses, hackatons with quality as one of the focuses etc.

Open to be used as educational example of real code is a quality that we could 
promote more and get more into education. This is a huge task because there 
are many established educational organisations. Anyway a path we should 
pursue.

Best Regards,
Bernhard

-- 
FSFE -- Founding Member     Support our work for Free Software: 
blogs.fsfe.org/bernhard     https://fsfe.org/donate | contribute
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 659 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20210217/85bb74d9/attachment.sig>