Commercial off-the-shelf

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Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) is a term for software or hardware products that are ready-made and available for sale to the general public. They are often used as alternatives to in-house developments or one-off government-funded developments (GOTS). The use of COTS is being mandated across many government and business programs, as they may offer significant savings in procurement and maintenance.

A MOTS (either modified or modifiable off-the-shelf, or military off-the-shelf, depending on the context) product is typically a COTS product whose source code can be modified. The product may be customized by the purchaser, by the vendor, or by another party to meet the requirements of the customer. In the military context, MOTS refers to an off-the-shelf product that is developed or customized by a commercial vendor to respond to specific military requirements. Because a MOTS product is adapted for a specific purpose, it can be purchased and used immediately. However, since MOTS software specifications are written by external sources, government agencies are sometimes leery of these products, because they fear that future changes to the product will not be in their control.

The motivation for using COTS components is that they will reduce overall system development costs and involve less development time because the components can be bought instead of being developed from scratch. This could prove to be useful for software development because of the ever increasing costs. Many considered COTS to be the Silver bullet during the nineties but COTS development came with many not so obvious trade-offs (Overall cost and development time can definitely be reduced, but often at the cost of an increase in software component integration work and a dependency on a third-party component vendor).

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Several groups have been formed to encourage the development of COTS systems and promote their adoption. The Mountain View Alliance is one such group.