Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software

Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software PDF Author: Joseph Feller
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262062466
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 590

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Book Description
Leading Free and Open Source software researchers and analysts consider the status of the open source revolution and its effect on industry and society.

Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software

Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software PDF Author: Joseph Feller
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262062466
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 590

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Book Description
Leading Free and Open Source software researchers and analysts consider the status of the open source revolution and its effect on industry and society.

Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives

Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives PDF Author: St.Amant, Kirk
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 159140892X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 766

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Book Description
This handbook of research is one of the few texts to combine Open Source Software (OSS) in public and private sector activities into a single reference source. It examines how the use of OSS affects practices in society, business, government, education, and law.

Open Source Software in Life Science Research

Open Source Software in Life Science Research PDF Author: Lee Harland
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 1908818247
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Book Description
The free/open source approach has grown from a minor activity to become a significant producer of robust, task-orientated software for a wide variety of situations and applications. To life science informatics groups, these systems present an appealing proposition - high quality software at a very attractive price. Open source software in life science research considers how industry and applied research groups have embraced these resources, discussing practical implementations that address real-world business problems. The book is divided into four parts. Part one looks at laboratory data management and chemical informatics, covering software such as Bioclipse, OpenTox, ImageJ and KNIME. In part two, the focus turns to genomics and bioinformatics tools, with chapters examining GenomicsTools and EBI Atlas software, as well as the practicalities of setting up an ‘omics’ platform and managing large volumes of data. Chapters in part three examine information and knowledge management, covering a range of topics including software for web-based collaboration, open source search and visualisation technologies for scientific business applications, and specific software such as DesignTracker and Utopia Documents. Part four looks at semantic technologies such as Semantic MediaWiki, TripleMap and Chem2Bio2RDF, before part five examines clinical analytics, and validation and regulatory compliance of free/open source software. Finally, the book concludes by looking at future perspectives and the economics and free/open source software in industry. Discusses a broad range of applications from a variety of sectors Provides a unique perspective on work normally performed behind closed doors Highlights the criteria used to compare and assess different approaches to solving problems

Free/open Source Software Development

Free/open Source Software Development PDF Author: Stefan Koch
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 9781591403692
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
"Free/Open Source Software Development" uses a multitude of research approaches to explore free and open source software development processes, attributes of their products, and the workings within the development communities.

The Rise of Open-Source Software

The Rise of Open-Source Software PDF Author: IntroBooks Team
Publisher: IntroBooks
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description
Open source software finds its connections with free software and is part of free and open source software over the extended term. Open-source software (OSS) is a form of computer software program that releases source code under a licensing legitimacy wherein the copyright holder allows users the privilege to analyze, modify and share the software to anyone and for any productive purpose. Open-source software may be created either freely and collaboratively. Open-source software is a case in point of open collaboration. The progress of open-source software will offer assorted perspectives beyond those of a single enterprise A 2008 study from the Standish Group reported that the implementation of open-source software models culminated in savings for customers of around $60 billion (£ 48 billion) annually. Initiatives of open source software are undertaken and managed by a network of voluntary programming associations and are commonly used in the gamut of both free and commercial outputs.

Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software

Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software PDF Author: Karim A. Lakhani
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Computer software
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description


The Success of Open Source

The Success of Open Source PDF Author: Steve WEBER
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674044991
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Much of the innovative programming that powers the Internet, creates operating systems, and produces software is the result of "open source" code, that is, code that is freely distributed--as opposed to being kept secret--by those who write it. Leaving source code open has generated some of the most sophisticated developments in computer technology, including, most notably, Linux and Apache, which pose a significant challenge to Microsoft in the marketplace. As Steven Weber discusses, open source's success in a highly competitive industry has subverted many assumptions about how businesses are run, and how intellectual products are created and protected. Traditionally, intellectual property law has allowed companies to control knowledge and has guarded the rights of the innovator, at the expense of industry-wide cooperation. In turn, engineers of new software code are richly rewarded; but, as Weber shows, in spite of the conventional wisdom that innovation is driven by the promise of individual and corporate wealth, ensuring the free distribution of code among computer programmers can empower a more effective process for building intellectual products. In the case of Open Source, independent programmers--sometimes hundreds or thousands of them--make unpaid contributions to software that develops organically, through trial and error. Weber argues that the success of open source is not a freakish exception to economic principles. The open source community is guided by standards, rules, decisionmaking procedures, and sanctioning mechanisms. Weber explains the political and economic dynamics of this mysterious but important market development. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Property and the Problem of Software 2. The Early History of Open Source 3. What Is Open Source and How Does It Work? 4. A Maturing Model of Production 5. Explaining Open Source: Microfoundations 6. Explaining Open Source: Macro-Organization 7. Business Models and the Law 8. The Code That Changed the World? Notes Index Reviews of this book: In the world of open-source software, true believers can be a fervent bunch. Linux, for example, may act as a credo as well as an operating system. But there is much substance beyond zealotry, says Steven Weber, the author of The Success of Open Source...An open-source operating system offers its source code up to be played with, extended, debugged, and otherwise tweaked in an orgy of user collaboration. The author traces the roots of that ethos and process in the early years of computers...He also analyzes the interface between open source and the worlds of business and law, as well as wider issues in the clash between hierarchical structures and networks, a subject with relevance beyond the software industry to the war on terrorism. --Nina C. Ayoub, Chronicle of Higher Education Reviews of this book: A valuable new account of the [open-source software] movement. --Edward Rothstein, New York Times We can blindly continue to develop, reward, protect, and organize around knowledge assets on the comfortable assumption that their traditional property rights remain inviolate. Or we can listen to Steven Weber and begin to make our peace with the uncomfortable fact that the very foundations of our familiar "knowledge as property" world have irrevocably shifted. --Alan Kantrow, Chief Knowledge Officer, Monitor Group Ever since the invention of agriculture, human beings have had only three social-engineering tools for organizing any large-scale division of labor: markets (and the carrots of material benefits they offer), hierarchies (and the sticks of punishment they impose), and charisma (and the promises of rapture they offer). Now there is the possibility of a fourth mode of effective social organization--one that we perhaps see in embryo in the creation and maintenance of open-source software. My Berkeley colleague Steven Weber's book is a brilliant exploration of this fascinating topic. --J. Bradford DeLong, Department of Economics, University of California at Berkeley Steven Weber has produced a significant, insightful book that is both smart and important. The most impressive achievement of this volume is that Weber has spent the time to learn and think about the technological, sociological, business, and legal perspectives related to open source. The Success of Open Source is timely and more thought provoking than almost anything I've come across in the past several years. It deserves careful reading by a wide audience. --Jonathan Aronson, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California

A Business Ecology Perspective on Community-Driven Open Source

A Business Ecology Perspective on Community-Driven Open Source PDF Author: Markus Radits
Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press
ISBN: 9176853055
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
This thesis approaches the phenomenon of open source software (OSS) from a managerial and organisational point of view. In a slightly narrower sense, this thesis studies commercialisation aspects around community-driven open source. The term ‘community-driven’ signifies open source projects that are managed, steered, and controlled by communities of volunteers, as opposed to those that are managed, steered, and controlled by single corporate sponsors. By adopting a business ecology perspective, this thesis places emphasis on the larger context within which the commercialisation of OSS is embedded (e.g., global and collaborative production regimes, ideological foundations, market characteristics, and diffuse boundary conditions). Because many business benefits arise as a consequence of the activities taking place in the communities and ecosystems around open source projects, a business ecology perspective may be a useful analytical guide for understanding the opportunities, challenges, and risks that firms face in commercializing OSS. There are two overarching themes guiding this thesis. The first theme concerns the challenges that firms face in commercialising community-driven open source. There is a tendency in the literature on business ecosystems and open source to emphasise the benefits, opportunities, and positive aspects of behaviour, at the expense of the challenges that firms face. However, business ecosystems are not only spaces of opportunity, they may also pose a variety of challenges that firms need to overcome in order to be successful. To help rectify this imbalance in the literature, the first theme particularly focuses on the challenges that firms face in commercialising community-driven open source. The underlying ambition is to facilitate a more balanced and holistic understanding of the collaborative and competitive dynamics in ecosystems around open source projects. The other theme concerns the complex intertwining of community engagement and profit-oriented venturing. As is acknowledged in the literature, the subject of firm-community interaction has become increasingly important because the survival, success, and sustainability of peer production communities has become of strategic relevance to many organisations. However, while many strategic benefits may arise as a consequence of firm-community interaction, there is a lack of research studying how the value-creating logics of firm–community interaction are embedded within the bigger picture in which they occur. Bearing this bigger picture in mind, this thesis explores the intertwining of volunteer community engagement and profit-oriented venturing by focusing on four aspects that are theorised in the literature: reinforcement, complementarity, synergy, and reciprocity. This thesis is designed as a qualitative exploratory single-case study. The empirical case is Joomla, a popular open source content management system. In a nutshell, the Joomla case in this thesis comprises the interactions in the Joomla community and the commercial activities around the Joomla platform (e.g., web development, consulting, marketing, customisation, extensions). In order to achieve greater analytical depth, the business ecology perspective is complemented with ideas and propositions from other theoretical areas, such as stakeholder theory, community governance, organizational identity, motivation theory, pricing, and bundling. The findings show that the common challenges in commercialising community-driven open source revolve around nine distinct factors that roughly cluster into three domains: the ecosystem, the community, and the firm. In short, the domain of the ecosystem comprises the global operating environment, the pace of change, and the cannibalisation of ideas. The domain of the community comprises the platform policy, platform image, and the voluntary nature of the open source project. And finally, the domain of the firm comprises the blurring boundaries between private and professional lives, the difficulty of estimating costs, and firm dependencies. Based on these insights, a framework for analysing community-based value creation in business ecosystems is proposed. This framework integrates collective innovation, community engagement, and value capture into a unified model of value creation in contexts of firm–community interaction. Furthermore, the findings reveal demonstrable effects of reinforcement, complementarity, synergy, and reciprocity in the intertwining of volunteer community engagement and profit-oriented venturing. By showing that this intertwining can be strong in empirical cases where commercial activities are often implicitly assumed to be absent, this thesis provides a more nuanced understanding of firm involvement in the realm of open source. Based on the empirical and analytical insights, a number of further theoretical implications are discussed, such as the role of intersubjective trust in relation to the uncertainties that commercial actors face, an alternative way of classifying community types, the metaphor of superorganisms in the context of open source, issues pertaining to the well-being of community participants, and issues in relation to the transitioning of open source developers from a community-based to an entrepreneurial self-identity when commercialising an open source solution. Furthermore, this thesis builds on six sub-studies that make individual contributions of their own. In a broad sense, this thesis contributes to the literature streams on the commercialisation of OSS, the business value and strategic aspects of open source, the interrelationships between community forms of organising and entrepreneurial activities, and the nascent research on ecology perspectives on peer-production communities. A variety of opportunities for future research are highlighted. Denna avhandling undersöker fenomenet öppen källkod, ’open source’, ur ett lednings och styrningsperspektiv. Mer konkret studeras aspekter på kommersialisering av ett community-drivet open source projekt (OSS, open source software). Uttrycket ’community-drivet’ hänvisar till open source projekt som drivs och styrs av volontärgrupper, till skillnad från open source projekt som drivs och styrs av enskilda företag. Genom att tillämpa ett affärsekologiperspektiv fokuserar denna avhandling på det vidare sammanhang som karaktäriserar kommersialisering av OSS, såsom globala och kollaborativa produktionssystem, värderingarna öppenhet och samarbete, marknadsstrukturer, och diffusa organisationsgränser. Aktiviteterna i open source communityn och dess kringliggande ekosystem kan bidra till många fördelar för företag, och därför kan ett affärsekologiperspektiv vara en användbar analytisk lins för att förstå de möjligheter, utmaningar och risker som företag står inför när de kommersialiserar OSS. Två övergripande teman lyfts fram i denna avhandling. Det första temat handlar om de utmaningar som företag står inför när de kommersialiserar community-driven OSS. Det finns i litteraturen om affärsekologier och open source en tendens att betona fördelar, möjligheter och positiva aspekter på beteende på bekostnad av att undersöka utmaningar som företag står inför. Affärsekologier innebär dock inte enbart möjligheter för företag, utan kan också orsaka en rad utmaningar som företag behöver hantera för att lyckas. Med utgångspunkt i denna obalans i litteraturen fokuserar det första temat på de utmaningar med kommersialisering av community-driven OSS. Detta görs för att bidra till en mer balanserad och holistisk förståelse av den på samma gång kollaborativa och konkurrerande dynamiken i affärsekologin runt ett open source projekt. Det andra temat handlar om sammanflätningen (intertwining) mellan community-deltagande och vinstdrivande verksamhet. Såsom det framgår i litteraturen har frågan om samverkan mellan företag och communities blivit allt viktigare, eftersom communityernas överlevnad, framgång och hållbarhet har blivit strategiskt viktiga för många organisationer. Även om många strategiska fördelar kan uppstå som en följd av samverkan mellan företag och communities saknas forskning om hur värdeskapande uppstår i en vidare kontext. Med ett bredare perspektiv i åtanke undersöker denna avhandling sammanflätningen av frivilligt community-deltagande och en vinstdrivande verksamhet genom att fokusera på fyra aspekter av sammanflätning som förekommer i litteraturen: förstärkning, komplementaritet, synergi, och ömsesidighet. Denna avhandling är utformad som en kvalitativ utforskande fallstudie. Det empiriska fallet är Joomla, ett innehållshanteringssystem som bygger på open source. Inom ramen för avhandlingen undersöks fallet i termer av samspel inom Joomla-communityn och de kommersiella aktiviteterna som sker runt Joomla-plattformen (t.ex., webbutveckling, rådgivning, marknadsföring, anpassningar, och extensions). För att uppnå ett analytiskt djup kompletteras affärsekologiperspektivet med idéer och förslag från andra teoretiska områden, såsom intressentmodellen, community-styrning, företagsidentitet, motivationsteori, prissättning, och buntning. Resultaten visar att utmaningarna med kommersialisering av community-driven OSS kretsar kring nio olika faktorer som kan grupperas i tre områden: ekosystemet, communityn, och företaget. Ekosystemsfaktorerna innefattar den globala verksamma miljön, förändringshastigheten och kannibalisering av idéer. Community-faktorerna innefattar plattformspolicy, plattformsimage, och att deltagandet i open source projektet sker på frivillig basis. Slutligen innefattar företagsfaktorerna suddiga gränser mellan privatliv och arbetsliv, svårigheten att uppskatta kostnader samt beroendeförhållanden mellan företag. Baserat på dessa insikter föreslås en modell för att analysera communitybaserad värdeskapande i affärsekologier. Modellen integrerar kollektiv innovation, community-deltagande, och value capture i en holistisk modell för community-baserad värdeskapande i kontexten samverkan mellan företag och communities. Vidare beskrivs effekterna av sammanflätningen av frivilligt community-deltagande och vinstdrivande verksamhet i termer av förstärkning, komplementaritet, synergi, och ömsesidighet. Genom att visa att sammanflätningen av frivilligt community-deltagande och vinstdrivande verksamhet kan vara stark i fall där det ofta antas implicit att kommersiella aktiviteter inte förekommer ger denna avhandling en mer nyanserad förståelse av företags roll i kontexten open source. Baserat på empiriska och analytiska insikter diskuterar denna avhandling ett antal teoretiska konsekvenser, såsom rollen som intersubjektiv tillit spelar i förhållande till den ovisshet som kommersiella aktörer står inför, ett alternativt sätt att klassificera community-typer, metaforen superorganismer i kontexten open source, community-deltagares välbefinnande, samt hur open source utvecklare hanterar övergången från en community-baserad självidentitet till en entreprenöriell självidentitet vid kommersialisering av OSS. Dessutom ger de sex delstudier som avhandlingen bygger på egna bidrag som presenteras i respektive delstudie. I stora drag bidrar denna avhandling till litteraturen om kommersialisering av OSS, affärsmässiga och strategiska aspekter på open source, samspelet mellan community-driven entreprenörsverksamhet samt den framväxande forskning som använder ett affärsekologiperspektiv för att studera kollegial produktion baserad på allmännytta. En mängd olika möjligheter för framtida forskning lyfts fram.

Open Source Systems: Long-Term Sustainability

Open Source Systems: Long-Term Sustainability PDF Author: Imed Hammouda
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3642334423
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International IFIP WG 2.13 Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2012, held in Hammamet, Tunisia, in September 2012. The 15 revised full papers presented together with 17 lightning talks, 2 tool demonstration papers, 6 short industry papers, 5 posters and 2 workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on collaboration and forks in OSS projects, community issues, open education and peer-production models, integration and architecture, business ecosystems, adoption and evolution of OSS, OSS quality, OSS in different domains, product development, and industrial experiences.

The Comingled Code

The Comingled Code PDF Author: Joshua Lerner
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262518567
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The interaction of open source and proprietary software and the implications for economic development. Discussions of the economic impact of open source software often generate more heat than light. Advocates passionately assert the benefits of open source while critics decry its effects. Missing from the debate is rigorous economic analysis and systematic economic evidence of the impact of open source on consumers, firms, and economic development in general. This book fills that gap. In The Comingled Code, Josh Lerner and Mark Schankerman, drawing on a new, large-scale database, show that open source and proprietary software interact in sometimes unexpected ways, and discuss the policy implications of these findings. The new data (from a range of countries in varying stages of development) documents the mixing of open source and proprietary software: firms sell proprietary software while contributing to open source, and users extensively mix and match the two. Lerner and Schankerman examine the ways in which software differs from other technologies in promoting economic development, what motivates individuals and firms to contribute to open source projects, how developers and users view the trade-offs between the two kinds of software, and how government policies can ensure that open source competes effectively with proprietary software and contributes to economic development.