After listening carefully to feedback from our user group we decided to change the rating procedure.  We are currently implementing a new approach that will be launched soon. In our next version users will have to authenticate themselves (and therefore register before if they haven’t done so yet - it’s the same procedure as for the forums)  before they can rate.  To complement the rating people will receive both a feedback on what the rating actually means and the possibility to enter a comment to support their rating. With this we hope to receive valuable additional insights into usage experience and more objective rating input. We are interested of course to receive feedback from the user community on whether they like this new approach or not of course. The changes should be online in a few days.

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When defining the categories and selecting the projects there was a hot and long debate on whether to include Programming Languages and how to compare and rate the individual projects. For example should a programming language be benchmarked against the generic needs and requirements you would list or against the usual domain the language is used in? PHP for example is mostly used for web applications, so should only this domain be looked at? Many people in the expert group voted for not including programming languages at all. Others including me claimed that programming languages are actually one of the most important categories in Open Source software over all and can’t be excluded. We finally decided to include them but there was still the discussion on how to compare them and to decide whether for example PHP is really higher in “enterprise readiness” than Perl for example. Well, after long discussions we finalized the ratings and are following the answer of our users with high interest. From a popularity point of view we seem to have made the right choices with the exception of Ruby that seems to be very popular with our users and even beats Java in popularity. From a user rating point of view Ruby and Perl are more positively rated by our users than what we proposed. But this is just the current assessment and gathered feedback at this point in time. We can expect many more debates and discussions over the coming months. Stay tuned!

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Only few days old, we have already received a lot of feedback from the EOS user community. We are happy that people are pleased with the site and find it quite usable. Aside of generic comments and feedbacks we also receive many proposals for projects and technologies to be added. We plan to implement a “propose project” functionality for this but for the time being eos@optaros.com is the easiest way to communicate missing projects. We have a fairly rigid process to check candidates and we have right now quite a long list of candidates to be added. Let me reiterate what it takes in our eyes to be included in the catalogue:

• The technology is “open source”
• The technology can be considered enterprise ready (see criteria), we don’t list products that do not achieve at least one star
• The technology fits into one of the categories we cover in EOS
• The technology clearly is well represented within enterprises across the world

We are aware that there are probably quite a number of projects out there that fit these threshold criterias and are not listed (yet). But, well, that’s the reason we brought it online. We want the input and feedback of the enterprise users out there on the web. Thank you for contributing!

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Not only did we launch our EOS at 10:02 CET today, we also experienced already significant peak loads and had to fix a couple of things to make the site faster. We apologize for any inconveniences! We already gathered quite a lot of feedback from our first day users and will make sure we can incorporate many of the ideas as soon as possible. With postings on Heise Online and Heise Open we attracted many interested people from Germany. Matt Asay blogged on EOS as well and we hope many more will cover it.

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