Open source and product lines architectures

The high level of customizability together with other business competitive advantages like reduced cost of acquisition and decreased vendor lock-in are pushing the open source adoption process. In parallel, the availability of the source code encourages the reuse. This process is evolving to an optimization of architectures that is meeting product line engineering. The product line maturity framework developed during ITEA-Families project identifies four key dimensions (business, architecture, process and organisation) to assess the maturity stage in product line development. This paper analyses the impact of open source within the architecture dimension focussing on the middleware and variability support. It identifies major differences from the conventional approach in product line development introducing Osiris R&D platform as an effort for defining an infrastructure supporting product lines for multiple domains. It gathers preliminary results from open source related research from Cosiris [1] (ITEA-Cosi [2] & ITEA-Osiris [3] projects syndication) ITEA-Sirena [4] and Domoware [5] projects addressing foundations for ambient intelligence applications.