The European Commission's Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software (SQO-OSS) project has announced the release of its Alitheia Core checking platform.

Alitheia has been developed by a consortium of European businesses, academics and open source developers.

The application analyses the quality of open source software and assesses the true potential of the development communities around the software.

SQO-OSS is a community-based project dedicated to checking the quality of free and open source software and making its data publicly available.

Founding partners include the Athens University of Economics and Business, the Aristotle University Of Thessalniki, Klaralvdalens Datakonsult, KDE, ProSyst Software and Sirius Corporation.

Alitheia Core will eventually allow open source software developers to deploy the system for themselves to monitor their own code quality.

The project's backers explained that this release should be considered as a usable alpha release and that, while core functionality is provided, performance issues remain and customisation is currently disabled.

Diomidis Spinellis, Alitheia project coordinator, said: "This release opens up SQO-OSS to the scrutiny of the open source software developer and user community.

"It demonstrates SQO-OSS' commitment to the deployment of a practical working system."