For years, the software industry has been suffering from problems subsumed under the term “software crisis”. While traditional development methods were not able to provide a cure, open source software (OSS) seems to be an effective approach to reduce product cycle-times and decrease development costs. Moreover, OSS has great potential to achieve high software quality and promote creation of reu...

The role of Open Source Software (OSS) in the e-learning business has become more and more fundamental in the last 10 years, as long as corporate and government organizations have developed their educational and training programs based on OSS out-of-the-box tools. This paper qualitatively documents the decision of the largest UK e-learning provider, the Open University, to adopt the Moodle e-le...

A mechanism for detecting Open Space Steganography (OSS) is described founded on the observation that the length of white space segments increases in the presence of OSS. The frequency of white space segments of different length is conceptualized in terms of an n-dimensional feature. This feature space is used to encode webpages (labelled as OSS or not OSS) so that each page is represented in t...

A model is developed to study how the code architecture affects open source software (OSS) development. The model incorporates the resource heterogeneity and diverse motivations of various groups of programmers as well as the strategic interactions among them. We argue that the major advantage brought by a modular architecture of OSS code base is that it reduces both the cognitive cost and the ...

Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) development is a complex process that is just beginning to be understood. The actual development process is frequently characterized as disparate volunteer developers collaborating to make a piece of software. The developers of F/OSS, like all software, spend a significant portion of their time in social communications to foster collaboration. We have analy...

Current estimates suggest widespread adoption of open source software (OSS) in organizations worldwide. However, the problematic nature of OSS adoption is readily evidenced in the fairly frequent reports of problems, unforeseen hold-ups, and outright abandonment of OSS implementation over time. Hibernia Hospital, an Irish public sector organization, have embarked on the adoption of a range of O...

Increasing adoption of Open Source Software (OSS) requires a change in the organizational culture and reshaping IT decision-makers mindset. Adopting OSS software components introduces some risks that can affect the adopter organization’s business goals, therefore they need to be considered. To assess these risks, it is required to understand the socio-technical structures that interrelate the s...

0 7 4 0 7 4 5 9 / 0 1 / $ 1 0 . 0 0 © 2 0 0 1 I E E E OSS packages make actual adoption a real challenge. This article presents a straightforward and practical roadmap to navigate your OSS adoption considerations. We do not have a universally accepted definition of OSS. For instance, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, and Apple recently introduced what they call “community-source” versions of their po...

Open Source Software (OSS) has become the subject of much commercial interest of late. Certainly, OSS seems to hold much promise in addressing the core issues of the software crisis, namely that of software taking too long to develop, exceeding its budget, and not working very well. Indeed, there have been several examples of significant OSS success stories—the Linux operating system, the Apach...

The increasing number of high quality open source software (OSS) components lets industrial organizations seriously consider integrating them into their software solutions for critical business cases. But thorough considerations have to be undertaken to choose the “right” OSS component for a specifi c business case. OSS components need to fulfi ll specifi c functional and non-functional require...