Henry Bros. Electronics (HBE) has been deploying a wide variety of open source systems over the last two years. These systems touch every aspect of the business including sales lead tracking, time reporting, and asset management. Open source systems are also used for the company’s internal portal and a client-facing reporting engine. Some of the company’s file servers are deployed using open so...

Openness is an unruly concept. While free tends toward ambiguity (free as in speech, or free as in beer?), open tends toward obfuscation. Everyone claims to be open, everyone has something to share, everyone agrees that being open is the obvious thing to do-after all, but for all its nt of Free Software. It is never quite clear whether being open is a means or an end. Worse, the opposite of ope...

Quantum mechanics must be regarded as open systems. On one hand, this is due to the fact that, like in classical physics, any realistic system is subjected to a coupling to an uncontrollable environment which influences it in a non-negligible way. The theory of open quantum systems thus play a major role in many applications of quantum physics since perfect isolation of quantum system is not po...

The theme of this issue of Artiicial Life is that traditional Dynamical Systems theory is inadequate for many problems in the study of Complex Systems. In this paper, I argue that the nite dimensional nature of traditional dynamical systems is inappropriate for evolutionary systems, but that simply embedding the dynamics into an innnite dimensional space overly complicates the mathematics and o...

In the offline world, we look to the people we trust and those they trust for reliable information. In this paper, we present a computational model of this phenomenon and show how it can be used to identify high quality content in an Open Rating System, i.e., a system in which any user can rate content. We present a case study (Epinions.com) of a system based on this model and describe a new pl...

Open Distributed Systems are the dominating intellectual issue of the end of this century. Figuring out how to build those systems will become a central issue in distributed system research in the next future. Although CORBA seems to provide all the necessary support to construct those systems. It provides a very limited support to the evolution of requirements in those systems. The main proble...

Just as conventional institutions are organisational structures for coordinating the activities of multiple interacting individuals, electronic institutions provide a computational analogue for coordinating the activities of multiple interacting software agents. In this paper, we argue that open multi-agent systems can be effectively designed and implemented as electronic institutions, for whic...

The subject of Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) standardization is becoming increasingly important to the telecommunications and information processing communities. A number of OS1 standards have been completed, others are near completion, and initial product offerings by vendors have begun. This paper briefly defines what OS1 is, the interrelationships of the various standards bodies, and th...