LICENSE COMPLIANCE ISSUES IN FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

Today, Free and open source software (FOSS) is widely used by organizations and individuals and viewed as a new approach to developing software. New software can be developed by integrating FOSS components or incorporating source code fragments, thus adding value in terms of functionality and quality. The use of FOSS components in developing new software requires developers to comply with the terms of the licenses associated with those components. The issues related to this compliance scenario are of paramount importance, because the license of a FOSS component can impact the whole Information System or computer application being developed. License compliance in FOSS is a significant issue today and organizations using FOSS are predominately focusing on this issue. The non-compliance to licenses in FOSS systems leads to the loss of reputation and the high costs of litigation for organizations. An automated approach is preferred to verifying license compliance of an FOSS being developed. Towards an automated approach, in this paper, we will argue for FOSS licenses in a machine interpretable form and for managing license compliance in a FOSS development process

F Prime: An Open-Source Framework for Small-Scale Flight Software Systems

Developing flight software for small-scale missions such as CubeSats and SmallSats is challenging. These missions typically have ambitious goals, modest budgets, and tight schedules. To meet these challenges, a good flight software framework is essential. Frameworks can provide an architecture, infrastructure, tools, and reusable software components, all of which can help developers deliver their code on time and on budget. In this paper we present F Prime, a free, open-source flight software framework developed at JPL and tailored to small-scale systems such as CubeSats, SmallSats, and instruments. F Prime comprises several elements: (1) an architecture that decomposes flight software into discrete components with well-defined interfaces; (2) a C++ framework that provides core capabilities such as message queues and threads; (3) tools for specifying components and connections and automatically generating code; (4) a growing collection of ready-to-use components; and (5) tools for testing flight software at the unit and integration levels. We describe the F Prime framework and tools and present our experience using them. We describe several enhancements to the framework currently underway in the areas of software design, software verification, and ground data systems for testing

Reducing the Barrier to Entry of Complex Robotic Software: a MoveIt! Case Study

Developing robot agnostic software frameworks involves synthesizing the disparate fields of robotic theory and software engineering while simultaneously accounting for a large variability in hardware designs and control paradigms. As the capabilities of robotic software frameworks increase, the setup difficulty and learning curve for new users also increase. If the entry barriers for configuring and using the software on robots is too high, even the most powerful of frameworks are useless. A growing need exists in robotic software engineering to aid users in getting started with, and customizing, the software framework as necessary for particular robotic applications. In this paper a case study is presented for the best practices found for lowering the barrier of entry in the MoveIt! framework, an open-source tool for mobile manipulation in ROS, that allows users to 1) quickly get basic motion planning functionality with minimal initial setup, 2) automate its configuration and optimization, and 3) easily customize its components. A graphical interface that assists the user in configuring MoveIt! is the cornerstone of our approach, coupled with the use of an existing standardized robot model for input, automatically generated robot-specific configuration files, and a plugin-based architecture for extensibility. These best practices are summarized into a set of barrier to entry design principles applicable to other robotic software. The approaches for lowering the entry barrier are evaluated by usage statistics, a user survey, and compared against our design objectives for their effectiveness to users

Wireless ad hoc Sensor Networks for City Street Light Maintenance

Wireless embedded devices, especially those of the open source hardware/software kind have seen rapid growth in recent years. This kind of devices when combined with ad hoc networks and sensor data can be a low-cost and highly scalable solution to many applications. In this paper we describe the experience of taking this concept of network infrastructure, developing application infrastructure and applying it, as a prototype, to a practical situation for a medium-sized city in the Buenos Aires province outer area, Argentina. We implement a novel sensor data delivery platform using open source hardware and software focused on streetlight maintenance at a fraction of the commercial implementation costs. To the extent of our knowledge this is the first system developed, deployed and documented in a Latin American country. Also presented in this paper is the system architecture as well as the design of hardware and software components as well as the results obtained.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

System requirements-OSS components: matching and mismatch resolution practices – an empirical study

Developing systems by integrating Open Source Software (OSS) is increasingly gaining importance in the software industry. Although the literature claims that this approach highly impacts Requirements Engineering (RE) practices, there is a lack of empirical evidence to demonstrate this statement. To explore and understand problems and challenges of current system requirement–OSS component matching and mismatches resolution practices in software development projects that integrate one or more OSS components into their software products. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with 25 respondents that have performed RE activities in software development projects that integrate OSS components in 25 different software development companies in Spain, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The study uncovers 15 observations regarding system requirements-OSS components matching and mismatch resolution practices used in industrial projects that integrate OSS components. The assessed projects focused mainly on pre-release stages of software applications that integrate OSS components in an opportunistic way. The results also provide details of a set of previously unexplored scenarios when solving system requirement–OSS component mismatches; and clarify some challenges and related problems. For instance, although licensing issues and the potential changes in OSS components by their corresponding communities and/or changes in system requirements have been greatly discussed in the RE literature as problems for OSS component integration, they did not appear to be relevant in our assessed projects. Instead, practitioners highlighted the problem of getting suitable OSS component documentation/information.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Mounting Books Project

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-05-19 03:00 PM – 04:30 PMThe Northwestern University Library undertook a software development project to create an automated workflow to enable files from its Kirtas book scanner to be both linked to the OPAC with a page viewer application, and ingested into its Fedora repository as archivally sustainable and reusable digital objects. The web-based Book Workflow Interface (BWI) software utilizes jBPM for management and web services for key creation components. It also features an AJAX interface to support drag-and-drop creation and editing of METS-based book structures. The BWI system ingests locally scanned texts as well as texts digitized by external partners or vendors. This project addressed the need for a Fedora-based book viewing tool that can be used by other research libraries developing digital repositories based on a Fedora systems architecture. The book view interface includes full-text search and view, search-within-a-book, book structure browse, page turning, and zooming interface components. The workflow system can be expanded over time to support new functions in the book publishing process, and can be redeployed in support of digitization processes for other types of media. Shifting from a simple book reformatting operation to a dynamic program that makes any multipage text object fully accessible online, this system dramatically improves Northwestern's ability to share its unique library and archival collections. The project was fully supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Book Workflow Interface and public book viewing software will both be released as open source in spring 2009.Andrew W. Mellon Foundatio

EDGAR: An Autonomous Driving Research Platform -- From Feature Development to Real-World Application

While current research and development of autonomous driving primarily focuses on developing new features and algorithms, the transfer from isolated software components into an entire software stack has been covered sparsely. Besides that, due to the complexity of autonomous software stacks and public road traffic, the optimal validation of entire stacks is an open research problem. Our paper targets these two aspects. We present our autonomous research vehicle EDGAR and its digital twin, a detailed virtual duplication of the vehicle. While the vehicle's setup is closely related to the state of the art, its virtual duplication is a valuable contribution as it is crucial for a consistent validation process from simulation to real-world tests. In addition, different development teams can work with the same model, making integration and testing of the software stacks much easier, significantly accelerating the development process. The real and virtual vehicles are embedded in a comprehensive development environment, which is also introduced. All parameters of the digital twin are provided open-source at https://github.com/TUMFTM/edgar_digital_twin

3D PRINTING, OPEN-SOURCE TECHNOLOGY AND THEIR APPLICATIONS IN RESEARCH

Open-source software received tremendous success as it drives down the cost of software and expand the distribution. Open-source hardware, as part of the open-source movement, has just risen into public attention for its potential to further drive down the cost of all kinds of manufacturing goods and reshape the manufacture chain. In this report we explores the history, development and the future of open-source hardware project, summarizing the opportunities, challenges and possible solutions. 3D printing is demonstrated as a booster to assist open-source hardware’s development. Low-cost 3D printer enables at-home and in-time fabrication, the download-print-use-improve-distribute cycle is established to encourage more to make and in turn to benefit more. Researchers, teachers and scientists are the first to receive the benefit since they are often lack of budget to purchase much expensive research tools with only limited function. To demonstrate the power of open-source 3D printing in driving down research cost. A library of 3D printable optics components are designed, printed and tested. The study shows significantly reduced research cost – more than 97% equipment investment is saved with some of the optical parts representing only 1% of the cost of its commercial version. Cost reduction stimulates a much broader participants that can further help in modifying, improving the project or even developing new project, this is how open-source hardware innovation chain is established. In the end it is summarized as the technology advances, printers suitable for all kinds of material such as metals, bio-materials, semiconductors are become feasible, the open-source paradigm has the potential to replace the tradition manufacture and activate the new future

A shared-memory algorithm for updating single-source shortest paths in large weighted dynamic networks

In the last decade growth of social media, increased the interest of network algorithms for analyzing large-scale complex systems. The networks are highly unstructured and exhibit poor locality, which has been a challenge for developing scalable parallel algorithms. The state-of-the-art network algorithms such as Prim\u27s algorithm for Minimum Spanning Tree, Dijkstra\u27s algorithm for Single Source Shortest Path and ISPAN algorithm for detecting strongly connected components are designed and optimized for static networks. The networks which change with time i.e. the dynamic networks such as social networks, the above-mentioned approaches can only be utilized if they are recomputed from scratch each time. Performing a re-computation from scratch for a significant amount of changes is not only computationally expensive, however, increases the memory footprint and the execution time. In the case of dynamic networks, developing scalable parallel algorithms is very challenging and there has been a very limited amount of research work that has been performed when compared to developing parallel scalable algorithms for static networks. To address the above challenges, this presentation proposes a new high performance, scalable, portable, open source software package and an efficient network data structure to update the dynamic networks on the fly. This approach is different from the naive approach which is the re-computation from scratch and is scalable for random, small-world, scale-free, real-world and synthetic networks. The software package currently is implemented on a shared memory system and updates network properties such as Connected Components (CC), Minimum Spanning Tree (MST), Single Source Shortest Path (SSSP), and Strongly Connected Components(SCC). The key attributes of software are faster insertions, and deletions when Comparing the software with the state-of-the-art network algorithms package such as Galois for MST takes less time and memory for updating the network. The shared memory implementation processes over 50 million updates on a real-world network under 30 seconds. The dissertation concludes with a summarization of the contributions and their improvement on large-scale network analytics and a discussion about future work on this field