Abstract
People and organizations that are considering the adoption of OSS, or that need to choose among different OS products face the problem of evaluating OSS in a systematic, sound and complete way. While several proposals concerning the evaluation of costs and benefits exist, little attention has been given to the evaluation of technical qualities and, in general, to the "usage-oriented" issues. In this paper the existing proposals are examined, the different types of qualities and issues that are relevant to potential users are described, and a coherent and innovative method for the evaluation of OSS is proposed. The proposed method is expected to support the potential user in the evaluation and choice of OSS in a flexible way, taking into account all the aspects that are relevant to the user.