Source Software Package Research Articles

АНАЛИЗ ИТ ПРОГРАММНЫХ ПРОДУКТОВ, ИСПОЛЬЗУЕМЫХ ЕСТЕСТВЕННЫМИ МОНОПОЛИЯМИ

In this paper, the Russian analogues of popular foreign information technology products of the class of operating systems, enterprise management systems, database management systems that meet the requirements of natural monopolies are analyzed. Information solutions of foreign and domestic developers are compared, their source software product and the possibility of modernization are determined. Attention is paid to possible negative consequences in case of untimely transition of the enterprise to domestic software. As an example, the experience of the natural monopoly enterprise open joint stock company "Russian Railways" is considered. The necessity of using enterprise management systems is substantiated by considering the economic and mathematical model of informatization of the activities of an entrepreneurial structure, and the positive aspects of ensuring the use of software and hardware complexes.

Роль программного обеспечения с открытым исход-ным кодом в современной разработке корпоративных информационных систем

At the moment there are many open source software products and packages, and their number is increasing every day. So it can be concluded that publishing source code is becoming more and more popular in the world of software development. When publishing the source code of a software solution or software package for use in the developer community, special attention should be given to the license type – this affects which scenarios will be available for use of the published package or software solution. It is also necessary to draw up full and detailed documentation and decide on the ways to promote the published package among developers. The purpose of the study was to justify the feasibility and necessity of publishing software products, packages and libraries for their use by other developers to build their own systems and services. The author meant to describe the major open source licenses, identify their features and differences, and those situations for which this or that type of license is suitable, as well as to demonstrate the need of writing documentation and describe ways to promote and popularize published software products, packages, and libraries in the developer community. Materials and methods. The paper considers official license documents describing conditions of use, reproduction, and distribution. The author analyzes the main ways and means to promote open source software products. Results. The article substantiates the relevance of publishing and using the source code of a software product, package or library. The author describes the main provisions of the most common licenses and gives advice on choosing the type of license when publishing source code for free use. The necessity of writing documentation for the published software product is substantiated. The article also describes some of the ways to promote published packages, such as the choice of name, speaking at conferences, and publishing articles with case studies.

Distribution of levels of soil contamination by heavy metals in the Ivanovo and Kostroma regions, Russia

Aim . Identify potential sources of heavy metal contamination of soil in the Ivanovo and Kostroma regions, Russia. Identify the risks to public health in the regions studied. Material and Methods . 72 sampling sites were laid out. Laboratory preparation of extracts from soil samples was carried out in the facilities of the Biological ‐ Chemical Faculty of Ivanovo State University. Hardware analysis was undertaken using a 210 VGP atomic absorption spectrophotometer. Statistical and mathematical data processing was carried out with the OpenOffice Calc open ‐ source software package. The plotting of cartographic materials was done with Quantum GIS Brighton. Since soils are often contaminated with several elements at the same time, the total pollution index (Zc) was calculated for them, thus reflecting the effect of exposure of the groups of elements. Results . Significant excesses above the maximum permissible concentrations (MPC) for cobalt, lead, and cadmium were not found in spring soil samples. The average pollution value Zc for the Ivanovo region was 20 units (a significant pollution level) and for Kostroma ‐ 38 (a high pollution level). The hazard coefficient for the content of heavy metals in the soil cover of the Ivanovo region is thus in the second range (significant risk), while in the soil cover of the Kostroma region it is in the third range (high risk). Conclusions . Mostly heavy metals enter the soil from solid waste dumps and also settle during the snowless season. There is a risk to public health.

Entrepreneurial actions and the legitimation of free/open source software services

Free/open source software users were previously responsible for managing the challenges associated with their software themselves. Recently, a new generation of entrepreneurs seized this emerging market opportunity by positioning themselves as service providers for free/open source software users. Conceptualizing such providers as “institutional entrepreneurs,” we find that due to the nature of the free/open source software context, they exhibit a different set of legitimation actions compared with similar efforts in other contexts. Based on our empirical analysis of free/open source software service providers and drawing on prior theory, we identify two entrepreneurial actions aimed at gaining legitimacy specific to the free/open source software context, namely, product-based theorization actions and evangelization actions. We also demonstrate that institutional entrepreneurship is shaped by the nature of free/open source software products and the openness values at the core of the free/open source software movement. Our work hence underscores the importance of the context of institutional entrepreneurship.

Analysis of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Product in Web Based Client-Server Architecture

Free and open source software (FOSS) differs from proprietary software. FOSS facilitates the design of various applications per the user's requirement. Web applications are not exceptional in this way. Web-based applications are mostly based on client server architecture. This article is an analytical study of FOSS products used in web-based client server architecture. This article will provide information about FOSS product such as FireFox (web browser), Apache (web server) and MySQL (RDBMS). These reveal that various FOSS products such as Apache server covers 65% of the market share, while MySQL covers 58.7% market share and hold the top-most rank.

Correlation-based software search by leveraging software term database

Internet-scale open source software (OSS) production in various communities generates abundant reusable resources for software developers. However, finding the desired and mature software with keyword queries from a considerable number of candidates, especially for the fresher, is a significant challenge because current search services often fail to understand the semantics of user queries. In this paper, we construct a software term database (STDB) by analyzing tagging data in Stack Overflow and propose a correlation-based software search (CBSS) approach that performs correlation retrieval based on the term relevance obtained from STDB. In addition, we design a novel ranking method to optimize the initial retrieval result. We explore four research questions in four experiments, respectively, to evaluate the effectiveness of the STDB and investigate the performance of the CBSS. The experiment results show that the proposed CBSS can effectively respond to keyword-based software searches and significantly outperforms other existing search services at finding mature software.

DESIGN OF A FREE AND OPEN SOURCE DATA PROCESSING, ARCHIVING, AND DISTRIBUTION SUBSYSTEM FOR THE GROUND RECEIVING STATION OF THE PHILIPPINE SCIENTIFIC EARTH OBSERVATION MICRO-SATELLITE

The Philippines’s PHL-Microsat program aims to launch its first earth observation satellite, DIWATA, on the first quarter of 2016. DIWATA’s payload consists of a high-precision telescope (HPT), spaceborne multispectral imager (SMI) with liquid crystal tunable filter (LCTF), and a wide field camera (WFC). Once launched, it will provide information about the Philippines, both for disaster and environmental applications. Depending on the need, different remote sensing products will be generated from the microsatellite sensors. This necessitates data processing capability on the ground control segment. Rather than rely on commercial turnkey solutions, the PHL-Microsat team, specifically Project 3:DPAD, opted to design its own ground receiving station data subsystems. This paper describes the design of the data subsystems of the ground receiving station (GRS) for DIWATA. The data subsystems include: data processing subsystem for automatic calibration and georeferencing of raw images as well as the generation of higher level processed data products; data archiving subsystem for storage and backups of both raw and processed data products; and data distribution subsystem for providing a web-based interface and product download facility for the user community. The design covers the conceptual design of the abovementioned subsystems, the free and open source software (FOSS) packages used to implement them, and the challenges encountered in adapting the existing FOSS packages to DIWATA GRS requirements.

La ética hacker frente al capitalismo netárquíco: software libre y peer production en las iniciativas de Economía Colaborativa en Andalucía

En los últimos años el término Economía Colaborativa se ha popularizado sin que, hasta el momento, haya sido definido de manera inequívoca. Bajo esta denominación se engloban experiencias tan diversas como bancos de tiempo, huertos urbanos, startups o grandes plataformas digitales. La proliferación de este tipo de iniciativas puede relacionarse con una multiplicidad de factores tales como el desarrollo tecnológico, la recesión económica y otras crisis superpuestas (medioambiental, de cuidados, de valores, de lo político) y un cierto cambio en los valores sociales. Entre 2014-2015 se han realizado dos investigaciones en Andalucía de manera casi paralela y con una metodología similar. La primera de ellas pretendía identificar prácticas de Economía Colaborativa en el entorno universitario. La segunda investigación identificaba experiencias de emprendimiento a nivel autonómico. A luz de los resultados obtenidos se plantea la siguiente cuestión sobre la naturaleza misma de la Economía Colaborativa: ¿nos encontramos ante prácticas postcapitalistas que abren el camino a una sociedad más justa e igualitaria o, más bien, estamos ante una respuesta del capital para, una vez más, seguir extrayendo de manera privada el valor que se genera socialmente? Este artículo, partiendo del análisis del conjunto de iniciativas detentadas en Andalucía, se centra en aquellas basadas en el software libre y la producción digital concluyendo cómo, gracias a la incorporación de ciertos aspectos de la ética hacker y las lógicas del conocimiento abierto, éstas pueden situarse dentro de un escenario de fomento de los comunes globales frente a las lógicas imperantes del capitalismo netárquico.

Modelling and Simulation of Maritime UAV-VTOL Robot Flight Control

The Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) Maritime Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (MUAV) has a number of applications including surveillance, search & rescue and real-time communications within a maritime environment. The objectives of this work is to study, research, design and develop, up to implantation, methodologies to apply efficient Command, Control, Navigation and Avionics Scenarios for VTOL-UAV robot operations within maritime air environments. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the overall control system of a five-rotor MUAV and the theoretical analysis of the control system. The controller is derived from the Paparazzi system, which is an open source community hardware and software package for all forms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).

The Implications of Incumbent Intellectual Property Strategies for Open Source Software Success and Commercialization

This dissertation investigates how IPR enforcement by proprietary incumbents influences open source software (OSS) adoption and production. It suggests user interest and developer activity on OSS are negatively affected by IPR enforcement particularly for OSS projects technologically overlap with litigated OSS and business projects specific to a litigated OSS platform. Second, it examines how royalty-free patent pools contributed by incumbents affect OSS product entry. It finds the pools related to a software segment will facilitate OSS start-up entry into the same segment; this marginal effect is especially large in segments with high cumulativeness of innovation or high patent ownership concentration.

Competitive Strategy for Open Source Software

Commercial open source software (COSS) products --- privately developed software based on publicly available source code --- represent a rapidly growing, multi-billion-dollar market. A unique aspect of competition in the COSS market is that many open source licenses require firms to make certain enhancements public, creating an incentive for firms to free-ride on the contributions of others. This practice raises a number of puzzling issues. First, why should a firm further develop a product if competitors can freely appropriate these contributions? Second, how does a market based on free-riding produce high-quality products? Third, from a public policy perspective, does the mandatory sharing of enhancements raise or lower consumer surplus and industry profits?We develop a two-sided model of competition between COSS firms to address these issues. Our model consists of (1) two firms competing in a vertically differentiated market, in which product quality is a mix of public and private components and (2) a market for developers that firms hire after observing signals of their contributions to open source. We demonstrate that free-riding behavior is supported in equilibrium, that a mandatory sharing setting can result in high quality products, and that free-riding can actually increase profits and consumer surplus.

New Generation of Software Metrics

Software measurement has always been an issue in software engineering. On one hand, engineering is about designing and building things and modeling, characterizing, monitoring, evaluating, defining, predicting, “prescripting”, controlling, and changing processes and their artifacts; additionally, measurement is essential to verify that the built artifacts comply with their requirements, to validate the product built versus its requirements and design and to keep the production process in control; the old management adage “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” is valid also in software development. On the other hand, because software is nonmaterial, it is a very difficult beast to measure. The compliance with requirements, which can vary greatly from system to system even in the same domain, is something difficult to “measure”, and it is almost impossible to devise metrics able to support such a measure that is repeatable across different systems. The development effort is perhaps easier to estimate and define across different software technologies and domains—after all it is always a matter of money—but it is still very difficult to measure in the ever changing languages, environments, and technologies. The difficulty of measuring software is even more critical in present times due to the increasing size and criticality of software within all technological systems, and the frequent changes in architectural paradigms and process models. New development methods, such as agile and lean approaches, the large diffusion of Open Source Software (OSS) products, service oriented architectures, cloud computing and softwareas-a-service business models, offshore development, ubiquitous computing, and the increasing integration of software and systems engineering, are examples of how software engineering is coping with the growing complexity of software and its applications. In this scenario, we need even more to be able to measure software products, processes, and competencies. To this purpose, radically new approaches, methods, and tools are being proposed in the software metrics field. Whereas it is too early to talk of breakthrough innovations and of definitive or also acceptable solutions for the abovecited issues, progress is being made in some interesting directions. Among these, we may mention software product and process metrics derived from complex network theory and in general from theoretical physics studies; social network analysis applied to software products and to developers’ relationships; measurement of size, effort, and quality of software developed in innovative ways, such as using agile and lean methodologies and open source projects; new metrics for service-oriented architectures and software-as-a service. This special issue presents new and relevant research work along these directions.

A primer of visual stimulus presentation software

The visual system has been the most widely studied sensory system in neuroscience during the last decades. A reliable and flexible visual stimulus presentation tool is one of the most important prerequisites for a thorough analysis of its sensory processing characteristics. While almost all sensory systems labs have created some home-grown solutions, these are not easily transferable from one lab to another or from one presentation platform to another. In addition, several stimuli are hard to generate with the desired accuracy in timing, color and luminance, 3D rendering or stereopsis. Vision Egg (Straw, 2008) is a more widely used software library, designed originally to probe the visual system of the fly. It is an open source and platform-independent software package built on top of Python (as the programming language) and OpenGL (for graphics instructions). For a well versed programmer, Vision Egg achieves its goals very well, providing a powerful and highly optimized system for visual stimulus presentation and interactions with hardware – including the ability to run experiments remotely across a network (via TCP/IP). While historically the Vision Egg software strongly adheres to an object-oriented model of programming this can be hard to understand for relatively inexperienced programmers. For instance, the temporal control of experiments in Vision Egg is predominantly through the use of presentation loops, whereby the user sets an object to run for a given length of time, attaches stimuli to it, assigns it to a screen, and then tells the object to “go”. This “mainloop-and-callback” mechanism of flow control has advantages where stimuli continue to run between trials. The alternative, however, of an explicit sequence of control statements can also be implemented (see Figure 2 of Straw, 2008). Table ​Table11 (adapted from Peirce, 2007) gives a comparison of various features of four well known stimulus presentation programs. Two of these (Vision Egg and PsychoPy) have very similar philosophies, are both implemented in Python, and differed originally in their low-latency real-time capabilities. The most substantive differences between them today are that Vision Egg offers relatively simple perspective corrected stimuli utilizing the 3D nature of OpenGL, while PsychoPy has an automated luminance calibration utility and interfaces more easily with certain types of hardware. Furthermore, the primary development platform of the Vision Egg is GNU/Linux, while it appears to be Windows for PsychoPy. Table 1 Comparison of several frequently used software packages for visual stimulus presentation. Another interesting issue discussed shortly in Straw's paper is the feasibility of setting up a stimulus library in form of a database that could be downloaded and used with different presentation environments. As everyone who has developed databases knows, there is more involved in such a project than just storing bitmaps (or sequences thereof) of a standard number of pixels. For example, the issues of frame rate, display luminance and position calibration, and synchronization with data acquisition and other hardware would all need to be addressed. Even further, the creation of a universal language for specifying sensory stimuli would be of great interest. Altogether this paper by Straw on the Vision Egg gives a fairly technical account of many relevant hardware and software considerations, but is nevertheless a well readable primer of considerations when deciding on what visual stimulus software to choose or extend.

The Move to the Middle: Convergence of the Open-Source and Proprietary Software Industries

Open source and proprietary software firms are no longer polar opposites on the business landscape. In the decade in which open source software has become a practical alternative to proprietary products, there has been a so-called move to the middle. Proprietary firms have begun to embrace open source development methods and products, while open source firms have resorted to traditional methods of generating revenues from free software. Further, in many important areas the two classes of firm have learned to co-operate as well as compete with one another. This article describes the evolution of co-operation and competition between open source and proprietary software product firms, focusing on the operating system, middleware, and application layers of the software stack.

Gaining competitive advantage in a knowledge‐based economy through the utilization of open source software

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to educate the knowledge worker on the benefits of using open source software, and to demonstrate how open source methodology promotes the collaborative and innovative attributes of knowledge management.Design/methodology/approachThe author lists the open source initiative's definition for open source products, licensing information, the value of open source in a global economy, misconceived barriers to open source adoption, a functional comparison of open source and commercial software products, and web sites where open source products may be obtained.FindingsOpen source usage is prevalent throughout the world for governmental, business, educational, military, and space exploration purposes. Notwithstanding, some commercial enterprises such as the Microsoft Corporation have viewed the open source movement as a threat to profitability, citing alleged intellectual property infringement violations. However, other commercial entities such as IBM, Oracle, Novell, and Apple computer have embraced open source technology to conduct business operations as well as satisfy customer needs. Public appeal for open source products has been strong enough for Microsoft, through a recent public statement, to disclose that the firm wishes to “build a bridge” with the open source community, an apparent realization that open source is here to stay. The knowledge worker should understand that commercial and open source applications may coexist in the same IT environment.Originality/valueA knowledge enterprise's total cost of ownership (TCO) can be significantly reduced through the use of open source software, resulting in an improvement to overall performance attributed to the collaborative and innovative nature of the open source model. Enterprises can benefit by taking a closer look at how open source technology helps to meet organizational goals and objectives in the most efficient and effective manner available.

Free and Open Source Software in Healthcare: An Overview of Current Applications and Organisations

This overview of the current state of availability of free/libre and open source software (FOSS) products, organisations and resources is intended to provide an introduction to the possibilities for health professionals and health informaticians who are interested in exploring the potential use of FOSS within their organisation, or simply for their own personal use. The initial question 'what is free/libre and open source software?' is addressed, so as to provide a basic level of information for those unfamiliar with the terms. Some of the commonly available FOSS applications for everyday use are introduced, before consideration is given to the issues that should be addressed when considering a migration to FOSS from commercial and proprietary software. Some of the many health-related FOSS applications and briefly introduced, and an overview is given of the international organisations devoted to providing an exploration of FOS for health informatics professionals, and which they can join. Due to the limited space available to discuss some of the issues, information is also provided on some of the many resources through which the reader can explore the issues in more depth.

Open Source Software: Fully featured vs. "the devil you know"?

The ILIAS learning management system (LMS) was evaluated, following its favourable rating in an independent evaluation study of open source software (OSS) products. The current review found ILIAS to have numerous features of value to distance education (DE) students and teachers, as well as problems for consideration in the system’s ongoing development. The current findings were compared with DE students’ reactions to a similar LMS product, ATutor, also rated highly in the independent OSS evaluation. In comparing an ATutor course website with a simple HTMLbased version of the same site, the ten students voted unanimously to retain the simpler site. This result is consistent with previous evaluation findings in the current series of reports, and indicates that increasing integration of product features does not necessarily improve a product’s ease of use or educational effectiveness.