Dec. 2010

IPA QualiPSo Japan Competence Center is organized as a section under IPA(Information-Technology Promotion Agency) Open Software Center. Its mission is promotion of OSS and Open Standards. For this goal, it is providing guidebooks, guidelines, development tools, development environments, software resources, study reports, education/training materials, seminar services and evaluation services for users, industries, OSS communities, Government and educational institutions.

QualiPSo Japan Competence Center provides following services;

The IPA OSS OpenLab is an on-line developer platform with first class support, security, and availability. It is also providing the automatic regression test suites for Linux kernel. The result of the test is available from the OSS iPedia Database System. It is also used as platforms for training of OSS.

Project Developers can test their software with various versions of operating systems, middle-wares and tools for software development provided in OSS Open Lab's virtual machine environment. So, they can perform portability tests on various distributions and versions of the Linux operating system, including some commercial operating systems. They also can perform interoperability test between their own software and OSS and non-OSS middle-wares.

Possible OSS users who are considering to migrate their IT systems to OSS can also try to use OSS on the Factory Services and evaluate practicality of the migration.

IPA OSS iPedia is an internet accessible database service which provides OSS related information to Japanese. The content of iPedia includes;

• IPA Fonts(high quality free fonts for Japanese characters) download
• Commentary of GPL v3
• Result of automatic regressiontest for Linux kernel.
• OSS Application catalogue
• OSS Software catalogue for private cloud computing system
• Best practices of OSS utilization
• Reports of OSS performance evaluation tests (Japanese / English)
• Reports of case study (Japanese / English)
• Preview and download of OSS related documents
• Frequently asked Questions, and
• OSS related glossary.

OSS developers and users can get OSS related information through the iPedia database.

QualiPSo Japan Competence Center is performing studies related to OSS and Open Standards, and publishing various reports and providing consultation service to Japanese government for their policy making. Governmental officers can consult with IPA QualiPSo Japan Competence Center and ask some studies or advice for information gathering and their policy development.

In order to develop IT engineers capable of using OSS and open standards, IPA QualiPSo Japan Competence Center has been preparing a model curriculum, and been adapted as a base of C-J-K common Model Curriculum. We’ve also performed some pilot training courses at university and/or technical school of IT, in order to develop the course materials and test the effectiveness of Curriculum. The result has been published at OSS iPedia.

Trustworthiness and quality of OSS is critical for establishing solid foundations enabling the development of wealth thanks to collaborative and open projects e.g. for Industry re-using OSS within their products and offers, for System integrators proposing OSS to satisfy needs of their customers, for research teams using OSS in their researches.

IPA QualiPSo Japan Competence Center, will perform a work on developing international OSS labeling criteria and process, and It will add QualiPSo Labelling Service in its service menu in near future.