QualiPSo is an Integrated Project (IP) which aims at making a major contribution to the state of the art and practice of Open Source Software. The goal of the QualiPSo integrated project is to define and implement technologies, procedures and policies to leverage the Open Source Software development current practices to sound and well recognized and established industrial operations. The budget for the project is over 10 millions euros and more than twenty companies and research groups will work in the project during the four years and a half of duration.

The project brings together software companies, application solution developers and research institutions and is driven by the need for having for OSS software the appropriated level of trust which makes OSS development an industrial and wide accepted practice. To reach this goal the QualiPSo project will define, deploy and launch the QualiPSo Competence Centres in Europe (4), Brazil (1) and China (1) all of the making use of the QualiPSo  Factory.

With the economy moving towards new open models, the potential impact of QualiPSo will be across the entire chain of software system development, proposing an integrated approach along many dimensions:

• Technically, through a focus on complementary problem areas addressed by strong research teams,
• Industrially, through application partners from different sectors who share a common vision for the potential of services,
  
• Managerially, through the creation of a strong management structure based on an entrepreneurial company,
  
• Internationally with partners from different countries coming from different continents,
  
• Individually, through strong existing working relationships between partners.

The need to sustain and advance the QualiPSo solutions in the future requires an open sustainability approach. QualiPSo is open in the following ways: its use of open standards and the open source software development approach it is based on an open community to enlarge and enforce its resources and input from researchers, scientists, art professionals and users it is open to expansion, by inserting new application scenarios and other project results in a "plug and play" manner.