A Rapid Review on the Use of Free and Open Source Technologies and Software Applied to Precision Agriculture Practices

Free Stuff for Your Computer

This paper investigates competition between open source and proprietary software. Open source software is divided into two types: free open source and commercial open source. Free open source software can be available from the not-for-profit community, and Commercial open source software is software product based on free open source software. The usability of both free and commercial open source software is assumed to be inferior to proprietary software. It finds that: (i) when commercial open source vendor faces competition from proprietary software and free open source software, it may still be able to obtain profits; (ii) commercial open source vendor's pricing (resp. share or profit) may still be much lower (resp. less) than that of proprietary vendor even if its software functionality is not inferior to proprietary software; (iii) commercial open source vendor's pricing and profit may not increase as its software usability increases; (iv) proprietary software's price decreases with the usability of commercial open source software. Index Terms—proprietary software, open source software, price competition, software features, software usability

Abstract. Open source software could emerge thanks to the development of the Internet, development tools, and computer literacy in general. The most attractive parameter of open source GIS software is a free license. The rapid pace of development, attracting developers from all over the world and high modularity stimulate the innovative nature of open source software. Here, the introduction of new technologies does not meet with opposition, but rather welcomes. These circumstances, as well as elucidation of the functional capabilities of such GIS, become very important in the search for means of providing the educational process with modern GIS software, which is traditionally an expensive proprietary software. Goal: Analysis of up-to-date GIS software protection and visual accessibility of the QGIS system in the first place with studying geoinformation systems.Quantum GIS (QGIS) is an open source software (GIS) geographic information system (GIS). Open software is one of the most interesting technological phenomena of the present, owing to its rapid growth in the development of the Internet, development tools and computer literacy in general. The key role in the creation, development and support of open source software is played, as a rule, by the community of developers forming around individual software products: commercial companies, groups of enthusiasts or research organizations. The term open source was proposed by Bruce Perens, one of the key leaders in the Open Source and Free Software movement, cofounder with Eric Raymind in 1998 of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), an open source software development organization that promotes and provides technical open source support. This open source term is used by OSI to determine whether a software license complies with open source standards. The main features of open source software as defined include free distribution, accessible source code, permission to modify this source code. At the same time, even successful open source software products require companies on the market ready to provide technical support and advice on issues related to the selected products. However, the number of companies providing support services for open source GIS software is still relatively small.

The need to ensure food security and promote environmental sustainability has led to a transformative period in agriculture. This period is characterized by the use of novel technology, which provides solutions that effectively address ecological concerns while also ensuring economic viability. Emerging technologies, such as precision farming enabled by drones, sensor-based monitoring systems and genetic editing techniques that result in drought-resistant crops, are significantly changing the agricultural sector. The integration of data analytics and machine learning algorithms is transforming supply chain management and enhancing the capabilities of predictive analytics in the context of crop diseases. Technological interventions serve to optimize efficiency and minimize the adverse ecological effects associated with farming, promoting the goals of sustainable agriculture. However, it is important to carefully address ethical and socio-economic considerations, including accessibility and data privacy, to manage these effects effectively. Therefore, the objective of this study is to examine the contributions of emerging technology to sustainable agriculture, evaluate its constraints, and suggest a comprehensive framework for its ethical and equitable integration. Communication technology has also impacted the agricultural sector, particularly with the increased use of connected devices. Artificial intelligence and deep learning advancements make processing collected data faster and more efficient, leading to more sustainable agricultural production using free, open-source software and sensor technology solutions. This technology enhances land optimization and boosts agricultural productivity, making sustainable farming practices more viable for both large and small-scale farmers. Our bibliometric analysis indicates a notable increase in interest in integrating sustainable agricultural methods with new technologies, particularly since 2018. It also revealed a strong link between precision agriculture, smart farming, machine learning, and the Internet of Things. However, awareness of technology is not very prevalent in the Asian region, especially among small-scale farmers. As a result, excessive usage of agricultural resources and wastage bring many adverse repercussions, and it's a high constraint to sustainable agricultural practices in the region.

Açık Kaynak ve Özgür Yazılımlar verimlilik, kullanılabilirlik, güvenlik, tasarruf, girişimcilik ve daha birçok açısından oldukça önemlidir. Bu çalışma, açık kaynak ve özgür yazılım başlığı altındadı “özgür yazılım”, “açık kaynak yazılım” ve “açık kaynak donanım” kavramları ile ilgili farklı yazarlar tarafından elde edilen çalışmaların incelemesini sunmaktadır. Bu sayede çalışmalar hakkında okuyucuya özet bilgiler sunarak konu ile ilgili okuyucunun ön bilgilenmesini sağmak ve gerekli olan yol haritasını ortaya koymayı hedeflemektedir. Bu çalışmada, genel olarak “Eğitim”, “Sağlık”, “Bilişim-Teknoloji” ve “Endüstri” alanındaki yayınlar üzerine yoğunlaşılmıştır.

While free and open source software becomes increasingly important in geospatial research and industry, open science perspectives are generally less reflected in universities’ educational programs. We present an example of how free and open source software can be incorporated into geospatial education to promote open and reproducible science. Since 2008 graduate students at North Carolina State University have the opportunity to take a course on geospatial modeling and analysis that is taught with both proprietary and free and open source software. In this course, students perform geospatial tasks simultaneously in the proprietary package ArcGIS and the free and open source package GRASS GIS. By ensuring that students learn to distinguish between geospatial concepts and software specifics, students become more flexible and stronger spatial thinkers when choosing solutions for their independent work in the future. We also discuss ways to continually update and improve our publicly available teaching materials for reuse by teachers, self-learners and other members of the GIS community. Only when free and open source software is fully integrated into geospatial education, we will be able to encourage a culture of openness and, thus, enable greater reproducibility in research and development applications.

Both the free and open source software (FOSS) as well as the distributed digital manufacturing of free and open source hardware (FOSH) has shown particular promise among scientists for developing custom scientific tools. Early research found substantial economic savings for these technologies, but as the open source design paradigm has grown by orders of magnitude it is possible that the savings observed in the early work was isolated to special cases. Today there are examples of open source technology for science in the vast majority of disciplines and several resources dedicated specifically to publishing them. Do the tremendous economic savings observed earlier hold today? To answer that question, this study evaluates free and open source technologies in the two repositories compared to proprietary functionally-equivalent tools as a function of their use of Arduino-based electronics, RepRap-class 3-D printing, as well as the combination of the two. The results of the review find overwhelming evidence for a wide range of scientific tools, that open source technologies provide economic savings of 87% compared to equivalent or lesser proprietary tools. These economic savings increased slightly to 89% for those that used Arduino technology and even more to 92% for those that used RepRap-class 3-D printing. Combining both Arduino and 3-D printing the savings averaged 94% for free and open source tools over commercial equivalents. The results provide strong evidence for financial support of open source hardware and software development for the sciences. Given the overwhelming economic advantages of free and open source technologies, it appears financially responsible to divert funding of proprietary scientific tools and their development in favor of FOSH. Policies were outlined that provide nations with a template for strategically harvesting the opportunities provided by the free and open source paradigm.

Guest Editorial Open source software: investigating the software engineering, psychosocial and economic issues

‘Opening’ the Xbox

Open Content Communities

Methodology for Public Administrators for selecting between open source and proprietary software

Open source software (OSS) is a collaborative effort. Getting affordable high-quality software with less probability of errors or fails is not far away. Thousands of open-source projects (termed repos) are alternatives to proprietary software development. More than two-thirds of companies are contributing to open source. Open source technologies like OpenStack, Docker and KVM are being used to build the next generation of digital infrastructure. An iconic example of OSS is 'GitHub' - a successful social site. GitHub is a hosting platform that host repositories (repos) based on the Git version control system. GitHub is a knowledge-based workspace. It has several features that facilitate user communication and work integration. Through this thesis I employ data extracted from GitHub, and seek to better understand the OSS ecosystem, and to what extent each of its deployed elements affects the successful development of the OSS ecosystem. In addition, I investigate a repo's growth over different time periods to test the changing behavior of the repo. From our observations developers do not follow one development methodology when developing, and growing their project, and such developers tend to cherry-pick from differing available software methodologies. GitHub API remains the main OSS location engaged to extract the metadata for this thesis's research. This extraction process is time-consuming - due to restrictive access limitations (even with authentication). I apply Structure Equation Modelling (termed SEM) to investigate the relative path relationships between the GitHub- deployed OSS elements, and I determine the path strength contributions of each element to determine the OSS repo's activity level. SEM is a multivariate statistical analysis technique used to analyze structural relationships. This technique is the combination of factor analysis and multiple regression analysis. It is used to analyze the structural relationship between measured variables and/or latent constructs. This thesis bridges the research gap around longitude OSS studies. It engages large sample-size OSS repo metadata sets, data-quality control, and multiple programming language comparisons. Querying GitHub is not direct (nor simple) yet querying for all valid repos remains important - as sometimes illegal, or unrepresentative outlier repos (which may even be quite popular) do arise, and these then need to be removed from each initial OSS's language-specific metadata set. Eight top GitHub programming languages, (selected as the most forked repos) are separately engaged in this thesis's research. This thesis observes these eight metadata sets of GitHub repos. Over time, it measures the different repo contributions of the deployed elements of each metadata set. The number of stars-provided to the repo delivers a weaker contribution to its software development processes. Sometimes forks work against the repo's progress by generating very minor negative total effects into its commit (activity) level, and by sometimes diluting the focus of the repo's software development strategies. Here, a fork may generate new ideas, create a new repo, and then draw some original repo developers off into this new software development direction, thus retarding the original repo's commit (activity) level progression. Multiple intermittent and minor version releases exert lesser GitHub JavaScript repo commit (or activity) changes because they often involve only slight OSS improvements, and because they only require minimal commit/commits contributions. More commit(s) also bring more changes to documentation, and again the GitHub OSS repo's commit (activity) level rises. There are both direct and indirect drivers of the repo's OSS activity. Pulls and commits are the strongest drivers. This suggests creating higher levels of pull requests is likely a preferred prime target consideration for the repo creator's core team of developers. This study offers a big data direction for future work. It allows for the deployment of more sophisticated statistical comparison techniques. It offers further indications around the internal and broad relationships that likely exist between GitHub's OSS big data. Its data extraction ideas suggest a link through to business/consumer consumption, and possibly how these may be connected using improved repo search algorithms that release individual business value components.

Free and open source software (FOSS) solutions are not only considered to be a disruptive force in the proprietary software industry but have helped firms deliver efficient and proficient processes and position themselves in global supply networks. The purpose of this study was to conduct an investigation of FOSS adoption in firms operating in high-velocity environments and identify factors that have an impact on the adoption process. Primary data were gathered from a cluster of firms operating in a high-velocity environment. The results provide an insight about the FOSS adoption process to both practitioners and academics alike. Our results indicate that performance attitude of managers, data regulation and facilitating conditions are important determinants of a firm's behavioural intention (BI) to adopt and use FOSS. Interestingly, influences from social and organisational domains have little effect on a firm's BI to adopt FOSS solutions. Overall, the article provides a structure to FOSS adoption which is relevant to managers and academics.

This paper examines the constraints on using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in academic libraries in South Africa and discusses why FOSS is unlikely to be adopted. Constraints such as limited appropriate technical skills, limited budgets, lack of consensus about and support for FOSS within and between libraries and institutions and constraints on bandwidth all contribute to a conservative approach to library solutions. Innovation Vol. 36 2008: pp. 55-63

Reviewed by: For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution by Christopher J. Tozzi Mark Priestley (bio) For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution. By Christopher J. Tozzi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Pp. 336. Hardcover $30. The term "free and open source software" (FOSS) does not primarily refer to software written for a specific application or to a particular approach to software production, but rather to the manner of its distribution. Typically, FOSS can be used, modified, and redistributed without the hindrance of, or payment to, its original authors. "Free" signifies liberty as well as the absence of cost, and "open source" means that the secrets of the software's code are exposed. [End Page 655] There has always been free software. Electronic computers were originally sold without software and users collaborated to exchange information and code, as the name of the 1950s IBM user group SHARE suggests. Software soon became commercialized, of course, but traditions of openness persisted, notably in universities. In the 1980s, largely due to the activities of MIT programmer Richard Stallman, a discourse of "free software" emerged in opposition to the perceived commercialization of hitherto widely available code, in particular the Unix operating system developed at Bell Labs. By the turn of the millennium, FOSS developers had created the GNU/Linux operating system and several other significant products. FOSS is now a crucial part of the networked world, providing both software—for example web servers, desktop environments, and the FOSS-derived Android operating system that powers the majority of the world's mobile phones—and many of the programming languages in which that software is written. Tozzi describes this transformation as a "revolution" and uses this metaphor to structure his book. However, he does not mention Thomas Kuhn's 1962 classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or the voluminous literature inspired by it. Instead, the book uses a high-level schema derived from reflection on historical revolutions to structure the story of FOSS. For example, a chapter entitled "the Moderate FOSS Revolution" is associated with Louis XVI's acceptance of a constitutional monarchy in France in 1789 and the period between the March and October 1917 revolutions in Russia, with Tozzi commenting that "it is generally during the moderate stage that the most productive and enduring revolutionary changes arise" (p. 163). The use of this structuring device seems rather artificial and does not add much insight to the story of FOSS. Tozzi begins his story with Unix, a system he describes as embodying much of the ethos of "hacker culture". He draws on Stephen Levy's book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984) to flesh out this rather vague notion, and in many ways Tozzi's book reads as an extension of Levy's narrative to the history of FOSS. A "crisis" in this culture (the word is not used in Kuhn's sense) caused by the attempted commercialization of Unix led uber-hacker Stallman to propose the term "free software" and to start an attempt to create a "free" version of Unix. In one crucial respect (the production of the so-called "kernel" of the system) this effort stalled, and only the efforts of a project initiated in 1991 by Finnish student Linus Torvalds enabled the production of a complete operating system, usually simply called Linux. The heroic exploits of Stallman and Torvalds are recounted in a chapter each and the book then follows the revolutionary script by describing, after the stage of moderate revolution, a period of "revolutionary war" characterized by infighting between proponents of different ideological approaches to FOSS and also between FOSS advocates and Microsoft. A final chapter surveys the successes of FOSS in the years since 2000. [End Page 656] Tozzi provides a lively and entertaining account of these developments, but much of the story is available in popular and journalistic accounts, and readers may be left feeling that an opportunity to dig deeper has been missed. Anxious to prevent the commercial capture of free software, FOSS developers have proposed a bewildering variety of licenses under which it can be distributed, and while Tozzi describes...