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

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

With the popularity of open source software (OSS) as an alternative to proprietary software (PS), proprietary-software firms such as IBM and Microsoft started to embrace this new paradigm during the past decades. We analyze how firms choose the software development strategy between OSS and PS, by constructing a duopoly model in which consumers sequentially purchase software and complementary services in a market that exhibits an indirect network effect. We show that a PS firm may benefit from the presence of an OSS firm, and the software market can be dominated by a single OSS if the indirect network effect is weak and the cost saving effect of OSS is negligible. We also show that the market can support two OSS if the cost saving effect of OSS is sizeable, and two PS if firms can provide fully compatible services to competitor’s PS. Building upon the existing works that investigate the competition between PS and OSS, this study improves our understanding of the role of OSS in firm’s software development strategy and market equilibrium.

This chapter evaluates the hypothesis that open source software can potentially help promote technological innovation. It analyzes the potential to open source software solve the tension between the need to provide firms and individuals with the incentive to innovate and the desirability of encouraging widespread use of cutting-edge technologies and examines the development and marketing of software. The analysis indicates that most firms extensively blend the development of open source and proprietary software, rather than specializing in one or the other and that they diversify between open source and proprietary software in other dimensions as well.

This study investigates how open source software can play influences on the quality choices of commercial open source and proprietary software providers. It considers two types of open source software: community open source and commercial open source, and assumes that the usability of commercial open source software is better than community open source substitute but inferior to proprietary substitute. It finds that: (i) the functional quality of proprietary software decreases as the functional quality of community open source software increases, but it may increase as the usability of community open source software increases; (ii) even if commercial open source producers must open the source codes of their quality contributions, they have incentive to enhance the functional quality of community open source software; (iii) the influence of community open source software’s quality (usability or functional quality) or commercial open source software’s usability on the functional quality of commercial open source and proprietary software may be not same; (iv) the appearance of commercial open source software may lead to proprietary software producers lowering their software functional quality.

Open Questions in Open Source: Exploring Incentives, Licensing and Competition

By modifying Hotelling model, we research the differentiation decisions between open source software (OSS) and proprietary software (PS) and the location decisions of proprietary software when open source software and proprietary software coexist in a software market. In this paper, we assume proprietary software producer pursues profit maximization and open source software is freely available. The study finds that: (i) Higher (resp. lower) the OSS's learning cost, smaller (resp. greeter) the software differentiation between OSS and PS; (ii) the compatibility degree between open source and proprietary software affects software differentiation; (iii) how the network externality and OSS user's software development skills affect the software differentiation decisions and the location decisions of proprietary software depends on the compatibility degree between PS and OSS.

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

Open source (OS) has emerged as a successful and reliable model that promotes community-based collaborative approach of innovations. Open source software (OSS) development is the most celebrated manifestation of OS approach. In the last two decades, the OS communities have delivered some extremely successful software products (Linux, Apache, MySQL, etc.) with surprisingly superior quality. The success of every OSS project depends on the size, structure and composition of the community evolved around it. Therefore, to embrace OSS development, it is necessary to understand how the systems evolve and the communities are formed in this community-based 'natural product development' process. This paper attempts to study the phenomenon of the evolution of OSS communities around an OSS project, the roles and actors involved in a typical OSS community by referring to four OSS projects [taken from Society for Risk Analysis (SRA), Japan survey project (Nakakoji et al., 2002)]. The paper also observes how OS approach promotes innovation activities and what makes such innovations special and sustainable. Overall the paper concludes that collaborative and natural process of community-based development of OS approach promotes creativity and helps translate ideas into innovations.

Full Papers.- A Framework for Evaluating Managerial Styles in Open Source Projects.- Forging A Community - Not: Experiences On Establishing An Open Source Project.- Mapping Linux Security Targets to Existing Test Suites.- Overview on Trust in Large FLOSS Communities.- PMLite: An Open Source Solution for Process Monitoring.- Requirements Acquisition in Open Source Development: Firefox 2.0.- Analysis of Coordination Between Developers and Users in the Apache Community.- Lost and Gained in Translation: Adoption of Open Source Software Development at Hewlett-Packard.- Mining for Practices in Community Collections: Finds From Simple Wikipedia.- Open to Grok. How do Hackers' Practices Produce Hackers?.- Social Dynamics of FLOSS Team Communication Across Channels.- Towards a Global Research Infrastructure for Multidisciplinary Study of Free/Open Source Software Development.- Update Propagation Practices in Highly Reusable Open Source Components.- Using Social Network Analysis Techniques to Study Collaboration between a FLOSS Community and a Company.- Empirical Analysis of the Bug Fixing Process in Open Source Projects.- The Total Growth of Open Source.- Adoption of Open Source in the Software Industry.- Migration Discourse Structures: Escaping Microsoft's Desktop Path.- The SQO-OSS Quality Model: Measurement Based Open Source Software Evaluation.- Short Papers.- An Open Integrated Environment for Transparent Fuzzy Agents Design.- Archetypal Internet-Scale Source Code Searching.- Channeling Firefox Developers: Mom and Dad Aren't Happy Yet.- Continuous Integration in Open Source Software Development.- Extracting Generally Applicable Patterns from Object-Oriented Programs for the Purpose of Test Case Creation.- Social Networking Technologies for Free-Open Source E-Learning Systems.- The Networked Forge: New Environments for Libre Software Development.- To What Extent Does It Pay to Approach Open Source Software for a Big Telco Player?.- A Framework to Abstract The Design Practices of e-Learning System Projects.- Assessing Innovation in the Software Sector: Proprietary vs. FOSS Production Mode. Preliminary Evidence from the Italian Case.- Detecting Agility of Open Source Projects Through Developer Engagement.- Facilitating Social Network Studies of FLOSS using the OSSNetwork Environment.- Reflection on Knowledge Sharing in F/OSS Projects.- Usability in Company Open Source Software Context - Initial Findings from an Empirical Case Study.- Willingness to Cooperate Within the Open Source Software Domain.- Open Source Project Categorization Based on Growth Rate Analysis and Portfolio Planning Methods.- Applying Open Source Development Practices Inside a Company.- Towards The Evaluation of OSS Trustworthiness: Lessons Learned From The Observation of Relevant OSS Projects.- Open Source Reference Systems for Biometric Verification of Identity.- eResearch Workflows for Studying Free and Open Source Software Development.- Panels.- Panel: Opportunities and Risks for Open Source Software in Industry.- Posters and Demonstrations.- Open Source Environments for Collaborative Experiments in e-Science.

License compliance in Free and Open Source Software development is a significant issue today and organizations using free and open source software are predominately focusing on this issue. The non-compliance to licenses in free and open source software development leads to the loss of reputation and the high costs of litigation for organizations. Towards an automated compliance management, we use the Open Digital Rights Language to implement the clauses of open source software licenses in a machine interpretable way and propose a novel algorithm that analyzes compatibility between free and open source software licenses. Also, we describe a framework that inductively manages compliance of license clauses in a free and open source software development. We simulate and evaluate the formalized license compliance management by analyzing a real-time open source software project GRASS.

There have been many successful outcomes from open-source software (OSS) development, such as Firefox web browser, Apache server application, Linux operating system, etc. Due to time and cost constraints, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) cannot afford proprietary enterprise software. Therefore, there is an increased demand for open-source development of enterprise software from SMBs. Many studies have been done on implementation of large scale proprietary enterprise software, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM). However, open-source enterprise software implementation has not received much spotlight yet, in spite of its potentials as a disruptive innovation. In this study, we investigate types of ERP modules developed by an OSS community, SourceForge.net (SF). We classified 447 the most popular ERP projects of SF into 14 categories of proprietary ERP software used in previous studies. When we analysed (by a qualitative method) the contents of each category, we found that SMBs are using OSS for different ERP modules developed and provided by commercial vendors.

Policy recommendations for public administrators on free and open source software usage

In open source software (OSS) development domain (a largely volunteer driven, geographically distributed, web based form of software development), it is mainly the OSS developers who are responsible for overseeing and managing the develop-mental activities. Existing OSS literature, based on qualitative analysis of web-based artifacts (e.g. data on discussion forums, issue databases) of a few OSS projects, report that requirements generation in OSS development is largely informal and ad hoc. But there is lack of an empirical study involving the practitioners themselves i.e. the OSS developers. We conducted a web-based survey among OSS developers in order to gain insights in to how they actually practice requirements engineering activities and what are their perceptions about it. For 57 requirements engineering practices obtained from closed source software development (CSSD) literature, the respondents indicated whether they currently used those practices in their OSS projects and whether those practices were useful for OSS development. The analysis of survey responses revealed that OSS developers used requirements engineering practices (from CSSD) significantly less in their developmental activities than what they believed they should have, indicated through usefulness ratings. We also asked participating OSS developers to indicate their perceptions about the usage of five informal requirements generation activities re-ported in OSS literature (e.g. developers simply asserting the requirements instead of eliciting). Subsequent analysis revealed that OSS developers used informal requirements generation activities significantly more than requirements elicitation practices (from CSSD) in their developmental activities. We use the survey findings to discuss implications for practice and research.

Open source software (OSS) is increasingly becoming an alternative for proprietary software (PS), particularly in the government sector globally. The adoption and implementation of OSS by the government sector is cited as one of the enablers for the adoption of OSS by the private sector. It is also apparent that in the government sector internationally, OSS is seen as a viable technology for reasons such as lowering software costs, growing local software development industry, and bridging the digital divide. In South Africa (SA), an OSS policy that mandates OSS usage within ministries is in place. But according to various open source advocates, little has happened with regards to OSS implementation in the SA government. This paper reports on the current status of OSS usage within the SA government by surveying forty (40) national departments, targeting Information Technology (IT) directors and managers. The results indicate that OSS usage within the ministries is not yet extensive as required by the OSS policy. Various challenges and obstacles are hampering full OSS implementation within the ministries. The contribution of this research paper is an OSS expansion model, which is proposed as a possible solution to improve the current status of OSS usage within the SA government departments. The model proposed is in line with SA government's implementation strategy as outlined in the OSS policy.

Against the “Networked Information Economy”: Rethinking Decentralization, Community, and Free Software Development Ben Roberts (bio) The free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS) movement is often cited as an example of fundamental changes in production associated with the rise of information networks. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams see it as an example of wikinomics, a powerful new form of economic production based on sharing and self-organization.1 Yochai Benkler argues that the form of social or peer production evident in FLOSS can compete with or even displace traditional forms of capitalist organization and sees it as a symptom of the “networked information economy,” replacing the “industrial information economy,” which has been in force since the late-nineteenth century.2 The main feature of this networked information economy is the much greater role within it for decentralized individual action.3 This essay contests this broadly liberal take on the significance of the free software movement. It argues that Benkler is typical of an approach that tends to view the Internet as the primary enabler of decentralization (for example, in the form of decentralized software development). Of course, it would be foolish to discount the role that networks have played in the success of FLOSS. But, as I will argue, an examination of its history suggests that its origins can’t be entirely accounted for in purely technological and economic grounds. The proponents of such an approach often resist the claim that their focus on networks is technologically determinist,4 arguing that the network itself is shaped by social and cultural factors. However, this makes the explanatory power of networks rather circular: the existence of networks explains social and cultural behavior at the same time as being explained by it. The explanation of free software in terms of the economic properties of networks is simply too static and asocial; it serves to explain how a particular mode of production can functionally compete with the market without really being able to account for how this change has come about. In particular, as I will show, the marginalization [End Page 385] of the question of labor in theories of peer production disconnects the analysis from wider changes in the nature of economic production. Moreover, the emphasis on the empowerment of individuals ignores the possibility that decentralization consists in radical new forms of sociality and collectivity, something that can perhaps be seen in the communities built around particular free software projects. As I will argue, Gilbert Simondon’s concept of individuation may help inform a better understanding of the emergence of such free software communities. From the perspective of a nonprogrammer, it is easiest to understand the concept of FLOSS by explaining how proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows is distributed. The operating system and applications that users run on their personal computers (PCs) are most often compiled software. The creators of the application have written the code in any one of a number of different human-readable programming languages; this program is known as the source code. The source code is then converted by another program known as a compiler into object or binary code, which is a machine-readable version of the program executed when the application is run on a PC. Binary, or object, code is the form in which software is most often distributed to users, either on installation media such as compact discs (CDs), installed on a computing device before sale or, increasingly, downloaded over the Net. The end user of proprietary software created and distributed in this fashion has no access to the original source code and is therefore unable to alter, change, or fix the software running on their machine: in the words of Bob Young, the former chief executive officer (CEO) of open source software company Red Hat, purchasing proprietary software is like buying a “car with the hood welded shut.”5 In addition to the absence of source code, proprietary software is usually distributed under the terms of a highly restrictive software license. In effect, the applications run by a user remain the property of the software maker and may be used only under the terms of this contract. Typically, the license prevents sharing...