Periodically an OSS Watch practice becomes sufficiently coherent to constitute a policy. We will add policies to this page as they arise. However we do not make a policy of creating policies for their own sake. So the list of policies on this page may be short.

non-advocacy

OSS Watch is not an advocacy group. Our goal is to provide unbiased advice and guidance. What this means in practice is that we do not claim that open source will be the best solution in every instance. Rather we want to help organisations (and individuals) think through their engagement with open source whether that is in a procurement process or a development process or even just a ‘thinking about’ process.

If you spot us moving beyond our non-advocacy role let us know and we will have a rethink.

recommending specific open source solutions

OSS Watch does not recommend specific open source packages. All examples of open source or proprietary software mentioned on our site are for illustrative purposes only. We simply do not have the resources and sometimes not the skill set to make a comprehensive and exhaustive evaluation of individual software packages. Nor do we provide comparative evaluations. We recognise that the needs of individuals and institutions vary. And although we can provide useful tips for how to evaluate software that might meet your needs and also sometimes pointers to useful evaluative tools and instruments we do not undertake these evaluations ourselves.

If you spot an instance on our site where we appear to have gone beyond the above policy and seem to be recommending specific software do let us know and we will revise our documentation.