Licensing and Business Models

License affects software companies’ business activities. While proprietary software vendors create custom licenses, open source companies have less flexibility. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) defines a list of 72 licenses as open source (“OSI approved”). For a project to follow open source licensing, it has to pick licenses from this set. Logically, we expect that an open source company defines its business model around the license that it selects. Thus, we can assume that business model decisions follow license choice. In our research we find that in some cases open source companies remove these license constraints for business reasons. We observed cases of open source companies moving from one OSI-approved license to another or companies innovating by adding additional terms. In all these cases, the decision of change is based on the license being a poor fit with their business goals. Not all open source companies are entitled to change the license because this option is available only to companies that own intellectual property. If they do not, they can try to reshape their business model, but that remains a suboptimal option. Whether cognizant of it or not, organizations are implicitly choosing a business model when they select a license. Therefore, it is very important to address licensing and business model decisions as one system instead of a disjointed two-step process. For this purpose we introduce (1) an evolutionary model where license selection and business model impact each other and (2) a taxonomy that addresses both licensing and business models. Our approach helps practitioners include revenue considerations in the licensing choice and researchers to more accurately study the antecedents and consequences of license choice.

An IoT-based solution for monitoring a fleet of educational buildings focusing on energy efficiency

Raising awareness among young people and changing their behaviour and habits concerning energy usage iskey to achieving sustained energy saving. Additionally, young people are very sensitive to environmental protection so raising awareness among children is much easier than with any other group of citizens. This work examinesways to create an innovative Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) ecosystem (including web-based, mobile, social and sensing elements) tailored specifically for school environments, taking into account both theusers (faculty, staff, students, parents) and school buildings, thus motivating and supporting young citizenś behavioural change to achieve greater energy efficiency. A mixture of open-source IoT hardware and proprietary platforms on the infrastructure level, are currently being utilized for monitoring a fleet of 18 educational buildings across 3 countries, comprising over 700 IoT monitoring points. Hereon presented is the system's high-level architecture, as well as several aspects of its implementation, related to the application domain of educational building monitoring and energy efficiency. The system is developed based on open-source technologies andservices in order to make it capable of providing open IT-infrastructure and support from different commercial hardware/sensor vendors as well as open-source solutions. The system presented can be used to develop and offer newapp-based solutions that can be used either for educational purposes or for managing the energy efficiency ofthebuilding. The system is replicable and adaptable to settings that may be different than the scenarios envisionedhere (e.g., targeting different climate zones), different IT infrastructures and can be easily extended to accommodate integration with other systems. The overall performance of the system is evaluated in real-world environment in terms of scalability, responsiveness and simplicity

Six Challenges in Platform Licensing and Open Innovation

This article describes six common challenges of design, incentives, and governance that arise in establishing platform businesses. It also proposes solutions. It considers, for example, how to open a platform to decentralized innovation yet still earn a return; how to incorporate best-of-breed innovations from different sources while avoiding problems of multi-party hold-up; and how to encourage sources of good ideas to contribute those ideas despite the risk of losing them to owners of indispensible complements. We express these issues and solutions as a reduced set of tradeoffs useful for managing information and technology property.licensing, open source, free software, dual licensing, platform, intellectual property.

Open Geospatial Viticulture: Determining the Mesoscale Impact of Climatic Change for Quebec's Winegrowing Bioclimatology

The combined utilization of climate scenarios, climate models and Geographic Information Systems [GIS] represent the most reliable tools to spatially determine the potential impacts of climate change in the near to end-of-century time horizons. With affordable computation, massive and open online courses, open access journals, cloud-based data visualization platforms, countless repositories of environmental and climate data available through the Internet, and the Free and Open Source [FOS] software movement, geospatial analysis is becoming an increasingly accessible field for professional researchers, the technically inclined, and the general public. I present here a Master's thesis that has been developed primarily using FOS software and openly accessible environmental data with few usage restrictions. The analysis is a multi-criteria-based suitability and climate categorization of Southern Quebec for European V. vinifera wine grape viticulture. Using several openly available GIS data sources, I identify and categorize the wine regions of Quebec according to a series of climate metrics developed specifically for wine studies. My analysis is based on both NASA Daymet present-day satellite-observed climate grids (Thornton et al., 2015) and ClimateNA (Wang, Hamann, Spittlehouse, & Carroll, 2016), a statistically downscaled gridded data set of 30-year climate normals extending from years 1980 to 2100 for two climate change scenarios, the Representative Concentration Pathways scenarios [RCP] 4.5 and 8.5 (Moss et al., 2010). I perform my analysis by examining the results of these viticultural metrics and climate variables both at the regional scale and at locations of presently-operating vineyards. All results are determined spatially using QGIS (QGIS Development Team, 2016) and other Open Source GNU/Linux utilities (Debian Project, 2015). My results show that present-day Saint Lawrence Seaway Valley barely exceeds the needed thermal suitability threshold for V. vinifera viticulture with most of Montérégie and Estrie at or below most “Cool Climate” categorizations and other agricultural zones are located well below climatic suitability for European viticulture. For future projections both RCP scenarios mirror an increase of ~200 growing degree-days [GDDs, ºC] from 1981-2010 to the 2011-2040 period and strongly diverging for periods afterwards. Results using the RCP 4.5 “Stabilization” show present-day vineyard locations may experience an increase in climate region category by roughly one or two climate categories (“Temperate” and “Warm”), while the RCP 8.5 “Business as Usual” scenario shows some present vineyard locations may become unsuitably hot with “Warm” viticultural climates extending above 50 ºN. I also present an extended literature review and methodology chapter that summarizes and explores my experience in employing almost exclusively FOS software and unrestricted data. This chapter is structured in a non-traditional fashion and is meant to provide an introductory background and discussion of the history of Open Source/Data/Access and Open Government movements. An extended methodology explores FOS software, Open Data resources, and showcases an example methodology for an agriculturally-focused FOS-GIS analysis. While the FOS movement is not presently capable of replacing all proprietary tools or present models of knowledge dissemination, Open Source approaches and a fostering of the Open ecosystem can be greatly beneficial for both the individual and at societal levels

Open Source Integrated Library Systems in Public Libraries

One of the most fundamental decisions a library makes is choosing an integrated library system, or ILS. A public library can remove unwanted outside influence and save money by switching their ILS to free and open source software, or FOSS. This article is an examination of the progress made by FOSS ILSs to become not only contenders against proprietary systems, but also an appropriate choice for financial, functional, and philosophical reasons. Included is a timeline of published evaluations, the milestone of 14% adoption, a summary of the current landscape, and example implementation cases. A functional analysis shows why a public library can now safely make the switch. A philosophical analysis shows why they should do so. Finally, a proposal is made to “Buy Back America’s Libraries, and return ownership of the keystone of our public information infrastructure to the people

Open source software GitHub ecosystem: a SEM approach

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