The European Union has granted funding to a consortium of open source groups, consultants and research bodies to measure the quality of open source software.

The Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software has been given €3.2m to build tools that will enable software companies and open source projects to benchmark the quality of their source code and prove its suitability for enterprise deployment.

The project's backers are aiming to address one of the perceived barriers to entry in the adoption of open source software: proof that software which is free and publishes its source code can out-perform expensive, brand-marketed software.

Among the aims of the initiative is the development of a plug-in based quality assessment platform, featuring a web and an IDE front-end.

It will also attempt to develop a set of software metrics that will take into account quality indicators from data in an open source project's repository.

Additional objectives include the publication of a league of open source software applications categorised by quality. All code generated by the initiative will be released under the BSD licence.

Led by the Athens University of Economics and Business, consortium participants include Sirius Corporation, KDE e.V. and ProSyst in Germany, KDAB in Sweden and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.

Professor Diomidis Spinellis, project lead, said: "An industry matures when its products become standardised commodities.

"Through the objective evaluation of open source projects, the Software Quality Observatory will provide many smaller and lesser known projects with the visibility and respectability they deserve."