Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global impact on the way software systems and and software-based services are developed, distributed and deployed. Widely acknowledged benefits of OSS include reliability, low development and maintenance costs, as well as rapid code turnover. Linux distributions, Apache and MySQL serve, among many other examples, as a testimony to its success and resilience.

However, state-of-the-art OSS, by the very nature of its open, unconventional, distributed development model, make software quality assessment, let alone full certification, particularly hard to achieve and raises important challenges both from the technical/methodological and the managerial points of view.

This makes the use of OSS, and, in particular, its integration within complex industrial-strength applications, with stringent security requirements, a risk. And, simultaneously an opportunity and a challenge for rigourous, mathematically based, methods in software analysis and engineering.

In such a context, the aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry who are broadly interested in the quality assessment of open source software projects, ultimately leading to the establishment of coherent certification processes, at different levels.

Following the success of the two previous editions (collocated to ETAPS'07, in Braga, and OSS'08, at IFIP WCC, in Milan, respectively), the workshop will focus on formal methods and model-based techniques that appear promising to facilitate OSS certification. Both foundational, methodological and pragmatic issues will be addressed, through both standard technical communications and reports on concrete case-studies and experimental data.

Contributions are expected to foster a broad debate on OSS assessment and certification, integrating techniques and elements from areas as different as

• product and process certification
• certification standards
• formal modelling and verification (model checking and theorem proving)
• software quality and reverse engineering
• static analysis, testing and inspection
• safety and security certification
• language design and evolving systems

Paper Submission deadline:	20 January 2009 (Extended)
Acceptance notification:	18 February 2009 (Delayed)

The one-day workshop will feature invited talks, a pannel discussion and contributed paper presentations. All contibutions, in the form of either full technical papers or short position papers, will undergo a peer-review process. All papers should be written in English and not exceed 10 pages and prepared using the specific ECEASST Latex templates available as zip or gzipped tar archives.

Papers must be submitted electronically through http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?c=.1752;conf=opencert2009

Accepted papers will be published in Electronic Communications of the EASST after the workshop. Pre-proceedings will be available online before the workshop and distributed on CD to the participants.

Publication of selected papers in a journal is currently under negotiation.

The Call for Paper is available in TEXT and PDF formats.

• Luis Barbosa, University of Minho, Portugal
• Antonio Cerone, United Nations University, Macau SAR China
• Siraj Shaikh, Cranfield University, UK

• Luis Barbosa, University of Minho, Portugal
• Manuel Barbosa, University of Minho, Portugal
• Roberto Barbuti, Università di Pisa, Italy
• Cornelia Boldyreff, University of Lincoln, UK
• Vicky Bush, University of Gloucestershire, UK
• Andrea Capiluppi, University of Lincoln, UK
• Antonio Cerone, United Nations University, Macau SAR China
• Gabriel Ciobanu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Romania
• Ernesto Damiani, University of Milan, Italy
• Roberto Di Cosmo, Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7, France
• Jesus Arias Fisteus, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
• Dan Ghica, University of Birmingham, UK
• Stefania Gnesi, ISTI-CNR, Italy
• Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
• Sotiris Ioannidis, FORTH-ICS, Greece
• Tomasz Janowski, United Nations University, Macau SAR China
• Fabio Kon, University of São Paulo, Brazil
• Paddy Krishnan, Bond University, Australia
• Bernard Lang, INRIA, France
• John Noll, Santa Clara University, USA
• David von Oheimb, Siemens Corporate Technology, Germany
• Alexander Petrenko, ISP RAS, Russia
• Simon Pickin, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain
• Siraj Shaikh, Cranfield University, UK
• Volker Stolz, United Nations University, Macau SAR China
• Ralf Treinen, Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7, France
• Joost Visser, Software Improvement Group, the Netherlands
• Tanja Vos, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
• Tony Wasserman, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Jim Woodcock, University of York, UK

• Bernhard Aichernig, Technical University of Graz, Austria
• Antonio Cerone, UNU-IIST, Macau SAR China
• Martin Michlmayr, University of Cambridge, UK
• David von Oheimb, Siemens AG, Germany
• José Nuno Oliveira, University of Minho, Portugal

All inquiries should be sent to opencert-2009@iist.unu.edu