Nowadays, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software (FLOSS) is becoming a strategic option for many organizations in the public and the private sector. The lack of well defined guidelines for IT managers may ...jeopardize the FLOSS adoption process. FLOSS adoption procedures are developed ad-hoc in every organization, hence, leading to potential wheel reinvention situations. Identifying factors that influence and determine adoption is crucial. In this article, we survey existing literature through systematic review methodologies to make visible the technical, organizational and economic factors that must be evaluated in the adoption process. We also provide hints for researchers on publications and the type of research that already covered this topic in the past. We studied almost 500 papers from which we selected a final set of 54 primary studies directly related to FLOSS adoption. We found twenty-two different adoption factors categorized as technical (nine), organizational (nine) and economic (four). This article aims to provide the basic building blocks to step into the creation of a guide for the FLOSS adoption. All the data we used in this study is available at this online repository: https://github.com/jagalindo/rea.victor.19-foss and doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2632543
Geographic origin of libre software developers Gonzalez-Barahona, Jesus M.; Robles, Gregorio; Andradas-Izquierdo, Roberto ...
Information economics and policy,
12/2008, Letnik:
20, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper examines the claim that libre (free, open source) software involves global development. The anecdotal evidence is that developers usually work in teams including individuals residing in ...many different geographical areas, time zones and even continents and that, as a whole, the libre software community is also diverse in terms of national origin. However, its exact composition is difficult to capture, since there are few records of the geographical location of developers. Past studies have been based on surveying a limited (and sometimes biased) sample and extrapolating that sample to the global distribution of developers. In this paper we present an alternate approach in which databases are analyzed to create traces of information from which the geographical origin of developers can be inferred. Applying this technique to the SourceForge users database and the mailing lists archives from several large projects, we have estimated the geographical origin of more than one million individuals who are closely related to the libre software development process. The paper concludes that the result is a good proxy for the actual distribution of libre software developers working on global projects.
An open real-time tele-stethoscopy system Foche-Perez, Ignacio; Ramirez-Payba, Rodolfo; Hirigoyen-Emparanza, German ...
Biomedical engineering online,
08/2012, Letnik:
11, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Acute respiratory infections are the leading cause of childhood mortality. The lack of physicians in rural areas of developing countries makes difficult their correct diagnosis and treatment. The ...staff of rural health facilities (health-care technicians) may not be qualified to distinguish respiratory diseases by auscultation. For this reason, the goal of this project is the development of a tele-stethoscopy system that allows a physician to receive real-time cardio-respiratory sounds from a remote auscultation, as well as video images showing where the technician is placing the stethoscope on the patient's body.
A real-time wireless stethoscopy system was designed. The initial requirements were: 1) The system must send audio and video synchronously over IP networks, not requiring an Internet connection; 2) It must preserve the quality of cardiorespiratory sounds, allowing to adapt the binaural pieces and the chestpiece of standard stethoscopes, and; 3) Cardiorespiratory sounds should be recordable at both sides of the communication. In order to verify the diagnostic capacity of the system, a clinical validation with eight specialists has been designed. In a preliminary test, twelve patients have been auscultated by all the physicians using the tele-stethoscopy system, versus a local auscultation using traditional stethoscope. The system must allow listen the cardiac (systolic and diastolic murmurs, gallop sound, arrhythmias) and respiratory (rhonchi, rales and crepitations, wheeze, diminished and bronchial breath sounds, pleural friction rub) sounds.
The design, development and initial validation of the real-time wireless tele-stethoscopy system are described in detail. The system was conceived from scratch as open-source, low-cost and designed in such a way that many universities and small local companies in developing countries may manufacture it. Only free open-source software has been used in order to minimize manufacturing costs and look for alliances to support its improvement and adaptation. The microcontroller firmware code, the computer software code and the PCB schematics are available for free download in a subversion repository hosted in SourceForge.
It has been shown that real-time tele-stethoscopy, together with a videoconference system that allows a remote specialist to oversee the auscultation, may be a very helpful tool in rural areas of developing countries.
This article will explore the vastest, most terminal, and—at least in the natural law tradition–most legal of spaces: namely, the home of the divine sovereign, Heaven. Specifically, I am interested ...in the contemporary (re)depiction of heavenly space as a ‘Miltonic’ theatre of war, as represented in Philip Pullman’s fantasy trilogy,
His Dark Materials
. This spatial
mise
-
en
-
scene
, as spectacular as it is, is a peculiar choice for an avowed atheist and anticlerical like Pullman. For it would seem to confirm than confront the verities of theology and the very structures of belief that Pullman seeks not only to critique but to overthrow. Namely, that Heaven exists, though as an absolute monarchy rather than (as Pullman plugs for) a republic. I will argue, however, that Pullman’s neo-Blakean vision of Heaven-as-Hell (ruled over by the tyrannical Metatron, as regent for a senescent ‘Authority’, i.e. God) is a metaphor: a metaphor for legal rather than theological space. And the legal space that Pullman metaphorises, I will argue, is nothing less than the imaginary of millennial intellectual property rights, an ideo-juridical inner space more and more projected upon and underpinning spatial notions like the ‘Commons’. The war in Heaven, then, is an elaborate allegory for struggles over the contol of knowledge under the conditions of Global Capital, with Lord Asriel, Lyra and Will functioning as Lessig-style activists, colonizing the new technologies (anachronised here as ‘amber spyglasses’, ‘subtle knives’, ‘alethiometers’ etc.) to topple ‘The Authority’ of intellectual property law and institute a democracy of digitality in which ideas are free to circulate in that most unreal and Real of spaces, the internet.
This paper presents some of the findings from a 5-year empirical study of FOSS (free/libre and open source software) commons, completed in 2011. FOSS projects are Internet-based common property ...regimes where the project source code is developed over the Internet. The resulting software is generally distributed with a license that provides users with the freedoms to access, use, read, modify and redistribute the software. In this study we used three different and very large datasets (approximately 107,000; 174,000 and 1400 cases, respectively) with information on FOSS projects residing in Sourceforge.net, one of the largest, if not the largest, FOSS repository in the world. We employ various quantitative methods to uncover factors that lead some FOSS projects to ongoing collaborative success, while others become abandoned. After presenting some of our study’s results, we articulate the collaborative “story” of FOSS that emerged. We close the paper by discussing some key findings that can contribute to a general theory of Internet-based collective-action and FOSS-like forms of digital online commons.
The article presents an economic analysis of Libre software and of its sustainability as a new economic model for software. We underline the role of Libre software development communities and analyze ...incentives for both kernel and obscure developers. We emphasize the role of the so-called ‘public’ licenses to provide an appropriate institutional framework. We show that several features of Libre software also allow it to improve faster than proprietary software, and therefore to achieve strong market performance when competing against existing standards, even when proprietary software producers react. We illustrate our point using a simple local and global interaction model to study the technological competition between Linux and Windows on the server operating system (OS) market. We finally argue that if sufficient initial momentum could be created through public intervention Libre software could turn from a fad into an efficient economic institution to correct inefficiencies due to network externalities.
FLOSSMetrics: Free/Libre/Open Source Software Metrics Herraiz, I.; Izquierdo-Cortazar, D.; Rivas-Hernandez, F. ...
2009 13th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering,
01/2009
Conference Proceeding
This paper presents FLOSSMetrics, a European Commission 6th Framework Programme- funded research project. The main objective of FLOSSMETRICS is to construct, publish and analyse a large scale ...database with information and metrics about libre software development coming from several thousands of software projects, using existing methodologies, and tools already developed. The project also provides a public platform for validation and industrial exploitation of results. The project is in its final stage, and some results and databases are already available, as is shown in this paper.
In this workshop paper, we describe results from a mixed-methods study of social diversity and corporate engagement in free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects. We collected survey ...responses from contributors to FLOSS development on GitHub to characterize perceptions of social diversity and corporate involvement in projects. We additionally analyzed data extracted from FLOSS projects hosted on GitHub to investigate differences in diversity based on corporate engagement levels. Our results suggest that organizational decisions may be detrimental to both the expansion of a project's contributor base and for increasing diversity across FLOSS ecosystems. However, as some survey participants note in their responses, organizations subsidizing FLOSS development have opportunities to increase access to and openness of projects which would be beneficial for diversity. This research thus serves to identify organizational factors and actions which harm and help initiatives to improve inclusivity and equity in FLOSS development.
Open Source and Open Content Schweik, Charles; Evans, Tom; Grove, J. Morgan
Ecology and society,
06/2005, Letnik:
10, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper discusses opportunities for alternative collaborative approaches for social-ecological research in general and, in this context, for modeling land-use/land-cover change. In this field, the ...rate of progress in academic research is steady but perhaps not as rapid or efficient as might be possible with alternative organizational frameworks. The convergence of four phenomena provides new opportunities for cross-organizational collaboration: (1) collaborative principles related to "open source" (OS) software development, (2) the emerging area of "open content" (OC) licensing, (3) the World Wide Web as a platform for scientific communication, and (4) the traditional concept of peer review. Although private individuals, government organizations, and even companies have shown interest in the OS paradigm as an alternative model for software development, it is less commonly recognized that this collaborative framework is a potential innovation of much greater proportions. In fact, it can guide the collective development of any intellectual content, not just software. This paper has two purposes. First, we describe OS and OC licensing, dispense with some myths about OS, and relate these structures to traditional scientific process. Second, we outline how these ideas can be applied in an area of collaborative research relevant to the study of social-ecological systems. It is important to recognize that the concept of OS is not new, but the idea of borrowing OS principles and using OC licensing for broader scientific collaboration is new. Over the last year, we have been trying to initiate such an OS/OC collaboration in the context of modeling land use and land cover. In doing so, we have identified some key issues that need to be considered, including project initiation, incentives of project participants, collaborative infrastructure, institutional design and governance, and project finance. OS/OC licensing is not a universal solution suitable for all projects, but the framework presented here does present tangible advantages over traditional methods of academic research.
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