The Open Source Software Competition is an important part of the ACM Multimedia program. The competition, that has reached the eleventh edition, is intended to celebrate, encourage and promote the contribution of researchers, software developers and educators to advance the field by providing the community with implementations of codecs, middleware, frameworks, toolkits, libraries, multimedia players, applications, authoring tools, and other multimedia software. These resources (http://sigmm.org/Resources/software/ossc) advance the field by providing a common set of tools for building and improving multimedia research prototypes. The use of these tools also allows others to replicate research results more easily.

To qualify, the software must be provided with source code and licensed in such a manner that it can be used free of charge in academic and research settings. As part of the review process, the software will be built from the sources. All source code, license, installation instructions, and other documentation must be available on a public web page or on publicly available software repositories such as GitHub, Bitbucket, etc. License compatibility with other open source software is encouraged. Dependencies on non-open source third-party software are discouraged, with the exception of operating systems and freely available commercial packages.

Authors are encouraged to prepare as much documentation as possible, including examples of how the provided software might be used, existing prototypes that use the software, video demos, download statistics or other public usage information. Entries will be selected for inclusion in the conference program based on peer-review. The criteria for judging submissions include broad applicability and potential impact, novelty, technical depth, demo suitability, and other miscellaneous factors (e.g., maturity, popularity, compatibility with commonly used programming languages, no dependence on closed source, documentation quality, etc.)

Authors of selected entries will be invited to present and demonstrate their software as part of the regular conference program. In addition, accepted overview papers will be included in the conference proceedings. An overall winning entry, as judged by reviewers and the program committee, will be recognized formally at ACM Multimedia 2015.