"You're looking for that level of information that you can use to make a valid business decision," said George Pace, a systems architect at Prudential Financial Inc., a division of The Prudential Insurance Company of America. "It's like having a customer-reference account for open-source." Pace is on the BRR steering committee.

The ultimate goal of BRR is to give companies a trusted, unbiased source for determining whether the open-source software they are considering is mature enough to adopt, according to the group. It will help adopters assess which open-source software is best suited to their needs and enable them to share findings with the community. It promotes use and adoption of open-source software and may assist developers in creating and delivering software geared to enterprise use.

The BRR program, which is being proposed as a new standard model for rating open-source software by enterprise adopters and developers, is a community initiative sponsored by the Carnegie Mellon West Center for Open Source Investigation, O'Reilly Code Zoo, SpikeSource and Intel Corp., which is a prime financial contributor to the project.