The potential for open source software in telecommunications operational support systems

In many industry verticals, open source software is proving to be a credible alternative to proprietary software. When compared to proprietary software, open source software can offer a number of benefits such as stronger customer involvement, lower costs and better quality. Despite these benefits, the take-up of open source software by incumbent telecommunications providers has been virtually zero, choosing instead to focus on major proprietary commercial-off-theshelf (COTS) packages due to prior strategic investments and negative preconceptions about open source software. Although an immediate change in take-up is not expected, the pressure to reduce operational support systems (OSS) costs is steering telecommunications providers to research potential opportunities for using open source software within their OSS. This paper addresses some of those opportunities. The general opportunities are presented using specific examples from current research. Potential short-term opportunities, using readily available open source customer relationship management (CRM) applications, and potential mid-to long-term opportunities, using open source OSS integration software, are analysed and evaluated. The paper concludes with a recommendation on what telecommunications providers should do to further investigate the opportunities presented by open source OSS.

Using OTS (Off-The-Shelf) components in software projects has become increasing popular in the IT industry. After project managers opt for OTS components, they can decide to use COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) components or OSS (Open Source Software) components instead of building these themselves. This paper describes an empirical study on why project decision-makers use COTS components instead of OSS components, or vice versa. The study was performed in form of an international survey on motivation and risks of using OTS components, conducted in Norway, Italy and Germany. We have currently gathered data on 71 projects using only COTS components and 39 projects using only OSS components, and 5 using both COTS and OSS components. Results show that both COTS and OSS components were used in small, medium and large software houses and IT consulting companies. The overall software system also covers several application domains.Both COTS and OSS were expected to contribute to shorter time-to-market, less development effort and the application of newest technology. However, COTS users believe that COTS component should have good quality, technical support, and will follow the market trend. OSS users care more about the free ownership and openness of the source code. Projects using COTS components had more difficulties in estimating selection effort, following customer requirement changes, and controlling the component’s negative effect on system security. On the other hand, OSS user had more difficulties in getting the support reputation of OSS component providers.KeywordsSource CodeOpen Source SoftwareSoftware ProjectSpecific MotivationIndustrial ProjectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Component-based software development (CBSD) is an efficient approach used by software developers to develop new software. The commercial off the shelf (COTS) and open-source software (OSS) are two styles to implement CBSD. The COTS provides the interface and depicts the black-box behavior, but does not support several software quality characteristics. On the other hard, OSS is a more efficient approach compared to COTS due to its source code availability. This research aims to identify the reusability level of OSS components from an online repository of OSS. The OSS components are classified based on Chidamber and Kemerer reusability metrics (CK-metrics). This paper proposed a mathematical model to establish the relationship between the reusability of CK-metrics. Reusability level of OSS component has been measured and most effective CK-metrics obtained by applying the Taguchi design and analysis of variance (ANOVA). The input parameters for the experimental design are evaluated based on the OSS repository. Performance analysis has been carried out based upon the interaction effect between the reusability of CK-metrics. Main effect plots are created to identify the most reusable component of the OSS. The genetic algorithm (GA) is used to predict the optimized value of the different control parameters. The results indicate that the OSS component reusability level is 0.698194. The reusability of software has a significant effect on the quality of software. The quality of software can be improved by increasing the reusability of software components.

A Web browser provides a uniform user interface to different types of information. Making this interface universally accessible and more interactive is a long-term goal still far from being achieved. Universally accessible browsers require novel interaction modalities and additional functionalities, for which existing browsers tend to provide only partial solutions. Although functionality for Web accessibility can be found as open source and free software components, their reuse and integration is complex because they were developed in diverse implementation environments, following standards and conventions incompatible with the Web. To address these problems, we have started several activities that aim at exploiting the potential of open-source software for Web accessibility. The first of these activities is the development of Adaptable Multi-Interface COmmunicator (AMICO):WEB, an infrastructure that facilitates efficient reuse and integration of open source software components into the Web environment. The main contribution of AMICO:WEB is in enabling the syntactic and semantic interoperability between Web extension mechanisms and a variety of integration mechanisms used by open source and free software components. Its design is based on our experiences in solving practical problems where we have used open source components to improve accessibility of rich media Web applications. The second of our activities involves improving education, where we have used our platform to teach students how to build advanced accessibility solutions from diverse open-source software. We are also partially involved in the recently started Eclipse projects called Accessibility Tools Framework (ACTF), the aim of which is development of extensible infrastructure, upon which developers can build a variety of utilities that help to evaluate and enhance the accessibility of applications and content for people with disabilities. In this article we briefly report on these activities.

Introduction Perhaps the business case for adopting open source software is an easy sell. After all, the software is free, and can be simply downloaded from the Internet and installed or customized as needed. Organizations interested in reducing the licensing fees of proprietary software, while also avoiding the penalties and legal liabilities associated with their illegal use, can definitely consider open source software a plausible alternative. However, less obvious than the cost savings but equally important are the barriers ("hidden costs") of adopting open source software. Open source software has created considerable excitement in the business world over the last decade. These applications, designed by groups of volunteer software developers, have the potential to break the current dominance of proprietary software and restrictive licenses for many business applications, reduce software development time and improve software quality, and most importantly, bring much needed software applications within the reach of individuals and small businesses, who cannot otherwise afford such software. Further, unlike proprietary software, open source software applications make their source code available for free, which can be customized to fit the unique needs of specific organizations. Many organizations have caught on to open source software and realized significant cost savings in technology expenditure as a result. For instance, Cendant Travel Distribution Services replaced a $100 million mainframe system with a $2.5 million system running on 144 Linux servers. Amazon.com cut its technology expenditure from $71 million to $54 million by switching to open source applications. Sabre Holdings saved tens of millions of dollars by adopting MySQL, an open source database product. Though the basic open source software is free, the prospect of paid ancillary products and services such as hardware and consulting has motivated many erstwhile proprietary technology vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems to embrace open source software and offer value-added services based on such software. Table 1 shows an estimated range of the current global market share of several of today's open source software applications. This table shows that though the open source market is large and growing for some application domains such as Web server (such as Apache), server operating systems (such as Linux Server), database server (such as MySQL), electronic mail client (such as Sendmail), and Internet browser (such as Firefox), it is lagging behind its proprietary counterparts in other domains such as client operating systems (such as Linux Workstation), office productivity software (such as OpenOffice), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. This pattern suggests that there may be significant barriers to open source software adoption among some sectors of the user populations. It is widely believed that proprietary software vendors often use fear, uncertainty and doubt to undermine and cut the market potential of their open source competitors. The objective of this paper is to reduce that uncertainty via a candid discussion of the barriers confronting open source software adoption and potential remedies to those barriers. These barriers and their remedies, summarized in Table 2, are discussed in detail.

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

Chinese software companies are increasingly using Open Source Software (OSS) components in system development. Integrating such components into new software systems leads to challenges related to component selection, component integration and testing, licensing compliance, and system maintenance. Although these issues have been investigated industrially in other countries, few state-of-the-practice studies have so far been performed in China and with a representative subset of software companies. It is therefore difficult for Chinese software companies to be aware of special issues, or to plan improvement of OSS-related processes. This paper describes a questionnaire-based survey in Chinese software companies of software development with existing OSS components. Data from 47 finished development projects in 43 companies have been collected. The results show that use of web search engines was the most common method to locate OSS components. Local expertise combined with requirements compliance was the most decisive factors when choosing an identified component. To avoid legal exposure, the common strategy was to use components without licensing constraints. About 84% of the components needed bug fixing or other code changes, rarely relies on support from the OSS community. However, close participation with the OSS community was rare, although most developers meant that this was important.

Chinese software companies are increasingly using open source software (OSS) components in software development. Development with OSS components faces challenges with respect to component selection, component integration, licensing compliance, and system maintenance. Although these issues have been investigated in the industry in other countries, few similar studies have been performed in China. It is therefore difficult for Chinese software companies to be aware of their special issues and to make the necessary improvements. This article describes a questionnaire‐based survey of software development with OSS components in Chinese software companies. Data from 47 completed development projects in 43 companies were collected. The results show that the main motivation behind using OSS components was their modifiability and low license cost. Using a web search engine was the most common method of locating OSS components. Local acquaintance and compliance requirements were the major decisive factors in choosing a suitable component. To avoid legal exposure, the common strategy was to use components without licensing constraints. The major cost of OSS‐based projects was the cost to learn and understand OSS components. Almost 84% of the components needed bug fixing or other changes to the code. However, close participation with the OSS community was rare. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Quality and security of software are key factors in the software development.This thesis deals with the quality of open source software (OSS for short) and different questions that are related with open source and close source software has discussed in the thesis proposal.Open source software is a process by which we can produce cheap and qualitative software and its source could be re-use in the development of the software.Close source software is more expensive than open source software and we can not re-use its source code, so there should be a way by which cheap and qualitative software should be produced.This thesis describes that how the quality of the open source software can be evaluated and increased.There are different factors which are helpful to increase the software quality these factors are low cycle time, low cost and small size of software.These factors are also helpful for the development of software product according to the requirement of clients and the users of that software.This thesis also describes the security and performance of close and open source software and it also analyze different software development processes.The quality of OSS can be increased by use of best evaluation techniques, best quality measurement, best development tools and best development process.There are also many challenges for OSS, which it has to face for improvement of the quality of OSS.Initially there were many drawbacks in open source software but with the passage of time improvement has produced in it.This thesis also describes the compression, advantages and disadvantages of the close source and open source software.

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.

Many organizations develop software systems using Open Source Software (OSS) components. OSS components have a high risk of going out of support, making dependency on OSS components risky. So, it is imperative to perform risk assessment during the selection of OSS components. A model that can predict OSS survivability provides an objective criterion for such an assessment. Currently, there are no simple, quick and easy methods to predict survivability of OSS components. In this paper, we build a simple Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) to predict OSS survivability. We performed experiments on 449 OSS components containing 215 active components and 234 inactive components collected from GitHub. The evaluation results show MLP achieves 81.44% validation accuracy for survivability prediction on GithHub dataset.

Component-based software development (CBSD) is becoming more and more important since it promotes reuse to higher levels of abstraction. As a consequence, many components are available being either open-source software (OSS) or commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS). However, it is still unclear how the decision for acquiring OSS or COTS components is made in practice. This paper describes an empirical study on why project decision-makers selected COTS instead of OSS components, or vice versa. The study was performed as an international survey in Norway, Italy and Germany. It focused on decision making on using off-the-shelf (OTS) components. We have gathered answers from 83 projects using only COTS components and 44 projects using only OSS components. Results of this study show significant differences and commonalities of integrating OSS or COTS components. Moreover, the study illustrates several research questions that warrant future research.

The reuse and integration of Open Source Software (OSS) components provided by OSS communities is becoming an economical and strategic need for today’s organizations. The integration of OSS components provides many benefits, but also risks and challenges. One of the most important risks is the lack of effective and timely OSS community support for dealing with possible integration problems. For gaining an understanding of the common problems that organizations face when integrating OSS components, and the role played by OSS communities, we performed an exploratory study on 25 OSS integration projects from different European organizations. The results show that the main way of reducing integration problems was the use of OSS components from well-established communities; therefore very few integration problems were identified. In most of the cases these problems were successfully solved with the support from the OSS community and/or colleagues. In addition, contrary to the common belief that understanding code from someone else is a hard and undesirable task, some integrators consider OSS code even more understandable than their own code.KeywordsOpen Source SoftwareIntegration ProblemIntegrator PerspectiveIntegration IssueOpen Source Software ProjectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

On the middle ground between open source and commercial software - the case of the Newbler program

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.