Open-Source Adoption Due Diligence Scorecard

Contents

• Make the adoption decision
• Score ten controls equally
• Read the rating as a decision posture
• Review evidence in a repeatable order
• Separate project evidence from internal decisions
• Use exports and embeds responsibly

Make the adoption decision

Use this scorecard to judge whether an open-source project is ready for organizational adoption. Popularity is discovery evidence, not adoption due diligence. Stars, downloads, forks, and rankings may help you find candidates, but they do not prove license fit, security response, recoverability, maintenance ownership, or a workable exit path.

The practical question is simple: can your organization operate this project responsibly, understand its exposure, and leave safely if the project or your requirements change?

Use the scorecard before production approval, during architecture review, or when comparing self-hosted options. Revisit it after a major release, ownership change, or material change in data, availability, or recovery needs.

Score ten controls equally

Score each control as Yes = 10, Partial = 5, or No = 0. The ten controls produce a score from 0 to 100. A high total matters only when the underlying evidence is current, direct, and relevant to your intended deployment.

1. Acceptable identified license. Confirm the project license, version, notices, and conditions fit your use. Use the SPDX License List for standardized identifiers and references, while reviewing important dependencies separately.

2. Visible maintained release channel. Look for version identifiers, release notes, and a channel your team can monitor. GitHub releases explain how projects publish deployable iterations and related notes.

3. Security reporting or advisory path. Find a private vulnerability-reporting route and understand which versions receive attention. GitHub’s security policy documentation describes how a repository policy can publish supported versions and reporting instructions.

4. Visible maintenance responsibility and succession risk. Identify the people, organization, or governance process responsible for maintenance. Record whether responsibility is concentrated, unclear, or supported by a durable group.

5. Reproducible deployment path. Establish whether another qualified operator can build, configure, deploy, and update the project from documented inputs, including pinned versions, secrets, services, and environment assumptions.

6. Upgrade and migration documentation with rollback boundaries. Find compatibility notes, schema or data migration details, upgrade steps, and a clear account of what rollback can and cannot undo.

7. Understood data export and exit path. Confirm how to export the data your organization depends on, in what format, with what completeness, and how it could be retained or moved elsewhere.

8. Known backup, restore, health, and logging needs. Document what must be backed up, how restoration works, which health signals matter, and where operational logs are produced and retained.

9. Reviewed critical dependencies and external services. Inventory libraries, databases, identity providers, mail systems, registries, APIs, and other services affecting security, availability, licensing, or exit.

10. Internal owner accepting operating and exit risk. Name the team or person accountable for patching, backups, incidents, upgrades, maintainer contact, and eventual retirement. This control belongs to your organization.

A Yes means enough evidence supports the control for the intended use. Partial means material evidence exists but a meaningful gap remains. No means the control is absent, contradicted, or still unknown. Do not silently treat unknown as Yes.

Evidence quality is recorded, not scored

Evidence quality is not automatically scored. The rubric measures control status; your notes should explain confidence in that status.

Prefer evidence that is:

• Current for the version under review.
• Directly linked to a repository, release, policy, configuration, or runbook.
• Reproducible by another reviewer.
• Clear about limits, exceptions, and assumptions.
• Matched to how your organization will deploy and operate the project.

The OpenSSF Scorecard can provide automated security signals across areas such as source code, builds, dependencies, and maintenance. The OpenSSF Best Practices criteria offer a broader checklist covering licensing, maintenance, releases, vulnerability reporting, builds, and testing. Both are supporting evidence, not substitutes for reviewing your data, architecture, recovery needs, or internal ownership.

Read the rating as a decision posture

The score bands below are OpenAlt’s disclosed rubric, not an audit standard. They do not guarantee security, stability, legal compliance, support, or successful migration.

Score	Rating	Decision posture
85–100	Ready with evidence	Proceed toward adoption when evidence is dated, material gaps are accepted, and an accountable owner is named.
65–84	Close, gaps remain	Continue review and close or explicitly accept remaining gaps before production use.
40–64	High-risk gaps	Require mitigations, a constrained pilot, or a different candidate before relying on the project.
0–39	Not ready	Keep the project in discovery until fundamental controls improve.

Do not let a strong total conceal a critical weakness. A project can score well yet remain unsuitable for regulated data, strict recovery targets, or a team without operational capacity. Read every control note before relying on the band.

Why stars are excluded

Stars show attention, not organizational readiness. They do not establish maintained releases, vulnerability handling, reversible upgrades, portable data, or internal ownership. The same caution applies to downloads, forks, rankings, and discussion volume. A less celebrated project with clear responsibility and a credible exit plan may be the safer organizational choice.

Managed hosting changes scope, not diligence

Official managed hosting may reduce deployment, backup, monitoring, and patching work, but it does not remove due diligence. Re-score controls against the actual service boundary.

Review the provider’s commitments, version policy, incident route, export process, retention rules, termination terms, and differences between the hosted offering and the project you assessed. Confirm which responsibilities remain yours, whether complete data can be exported without provider-only formats, and what happens if the service changes, becomes unavailable, or ends.

A hosted deployment may justify different evidence or notes. It should not become an assumption that risk has disappeared.

Review evidence in a repeatable order

Use a fixed workflow so enthusiasm does not determine the result.

1. Define the intended use. Record users, data, availability needs, integrations, deployment model, and consequences of failure. An internal tool and a core system require different evidence.

2. Pin the candidate and version. Record the repository, release, tag or commit, distribution channel, and review date. State exactly what was examined.

3. Review legal and release evidence. Confirm the license and notices, then examine release history, notes, supported versions, and upgrade guidance. Use SPDX as a reference, not as a substitute for legal review.

4. Review security and maintenance evidence. Look for a security policy, advisory route, ownership, governance, and succession signals. Use OpenSSF Scorecard and Best Practices as supporting references.

5. Prove the operating path. Deploy the reviewed version in a representative environment. Walk through configuration, updates, backup, restore, health checks, logs, migration, and rollback. Record what was tested, what required custom work, and what remained unproven.

6. Make the internal decision. Name the owner, list open risks, assign mitigations, and set a review date. Enter the score only after each note explains Yes, Partial, or No.

Separate project evidence from internal decisions

Project evidence describes what maintainers publish or demonstrate. Internal decisions describe what your organization can and will operate.

Project evidence may include:

• License files, notices, releases, and security policies.
• Build and deployment instructions.
• Migration notes and supported-version statements.
• Dependency manifests and external service requirements.
• Governance and maintenance information.

Internal decisions may include:

• Whether the data is appropriate for the platform.
• Recovery time and recovery point objectives.
• Staffing, on-call coverage, and patch responsibilities.
• Backup retention, access controls, and log retention.
• Acceptance of operating and exit risk.

Do not award the internal-owner control because a repository looks healthy. Do not mark recovery complete because documentation exists. Join project evidence with an internal runbook and distinguish between what is documented, tested, and accepted.

For broader context, see OpenAlt’s self-hosted maintenance statistics and open-source license statistics. Use easiest self-hosted apps for discovery and the wider self-hosted guide for deployment context.

Use exports and embeds responsibly

The widget keeps a note per control, exports dated JSON, and generates a normal dofollow HTML link containing the score and rating. All processing is local in the browser.

Treat the JSON as a decision record, not a certification. Remove secrets, private hostnames, credentials, personal information, and internal incident details before sharing it. Preserve the reviewed version, date, assumptions, evidence, and unresolved gaps so the result remains understandable later.

If you publish the generated link, identify it as your organization’s snapshot of a review. Include the review date and project version when they are not already visible. The score communicates this disclosed rubric; it does not imply endorsement, warranty, or a promise that the project will remain suitable.