  [Context] Open Source Software (OSS) is nowadays used and integrated in most
of the commercial products. However, the selection of OSS projects for
integration is not a simple process, mainly due to a of lack of clear selection
models and lack of information from the OSS portals. [Objective] We investigate
the factors and metrics that practitioners currently consider when selecting
OSS. We also investigate the source of information and portals that can be used
to assess the factors, as well as the possibility to automatically extract such
information with APIs. [Method] We elicited the factors and the metrics adopted
to assess and compare OSS performing a survey among 23 experienced developers
who often integrate OSS in the software they develop. Moreover, we investigated
the APIs of the portals adopted to assess OSS extracting information for the
most starred 100K projects in GitHub. [Result] We identified a set consisting
of 8 main factors and 74 sub-factors, together with 170 related metrics that
companies can use to select OSS to be integrated in their software projects.
Unexpectedly, only a small part of the factors can be evaluated automatically,
and out of 170 metrics, only 40 are available, of which only 22 returned
information for all the 100K projects. Therefore, we recommend project
maintainers and project repositories to pay attention to provide information
for the project they are hosting, so as to increase the likelihood of being
adopted [Conclusion] OSS selection can be partially automated, by extracting
the information needed for the selection from portal APIs. OSS producers can
benefit from our results by checking if they are providing all the information
commonly required by potential adopters...

Software Engineering