Putting Customers at the Center of the Universe: Combining Internal and External Information Resources

Putting Customers at the Center of the Universe: Combining Internal and External Information Resources, from June 2001

Scientific Utopia III: crowdsourcing science

Most scientific research is conducted by small teams of investigators who together formulate hypotheses, collect data, conduct analyses, and report novel findings. These teams operate independently as vertically integrated silos. Here we argue that scientific research that is horizontally distributed can provide substantial complementary value, aiming to maximize available resources, promote inclusiveness and transparency, and increase rigor and reliability. This alternative approach enables researchers to tackle ambitious projects that would not be possible under the standard model. Crowdsourced scientific initiatives vary in the degree of communication between project members from largely independent work curated by a coordination team to crowd collaboration on shared activities. The potential benefits and challenges of large-scale collaboration span the entire research process: ideation, study design, data collection, data analysis, reporting, and peer review. Complementing traditional small science with crowdsourced approaches can accelerate the progress of science and improve the quality of scientific research

An Exploratory Study of Ideology and Trust in Open Source Development Groups

Open source (OS) software development has been the subject of heightened interest among organizational scholars because of the novel social coordination practices that signal a departure from traditional proprietary software development. We propose that trust among group members in open source development groups (OSDGs) plays a key role in facilitating their success. Trust is important in this context because of the risk of opportunistic behavior by other members who volunteers may not have met and may never expect to meet, as well as a lack of explicit market contracts or common organizational affiliation. The open source community is differentiated by a coherent ideology that emphasizes a distinct set of interrelated norms, beliefs, and values. These serve to create incentives for open source practices that eschew conventional transactional norms in favor of a gift culture and a focus on reputations. In this study, we primarily examine the role of the shared ideology in enabling the development of affective and cognitive trust in OSDGs. We further examine how this trust leads to desired outcomes ñ group efficacy and effectiveness. The study is based on exploratory interviews, examination of archival records and a preliminary survey to understand the specific conditions of open source efforts on which this work-in-progress report is based. This is being followed-up by empirical testing of our research model through a survey of a broad variety of OSDGs. This study would contribute to a clarification of the role of trust in enabling software groups to work effectively and help to understand the bases of trust in ideology-permeated groups

Factors Influencing Adoption of Open Source Software - An Exploratory Study

Open Source Software (OSS), an example of an IS innovation, provides an alternative to proprietary software for organizations. Despite its free availability, OSS has not been universally adopted. While IS innovation has been extensively studied, there is a dearth of research literature on the adoption of OSS. Using a multi-site case study research method and a well known framework on the adoption of IS innovations, we explore this novel phenomenon and uncover critical factors that influence the adoption of OSS in organizations

The Maintainability of Open Source Software

The impact that OSS brings to the software economy should not be dismissible lightly. In a study by ANU-Merit (Ghosh, 2006), it revealed that OSS market share have seen considerable growth in the past five years. Based on the existing trend, the study predicts that OSS related services would gain 35% share of all IT services by the year 2010. With two thirds of free contributions coming from individuals, which is worth at least Euro 800million a year, companies may need to turn their heads to examine this option. This paper studies the maintainability of Open Source Software to provide managers with a set of tools to select maintainable products when compiling their product offerings, since OSS cannot be sold under the traditional license and support services is one way of profiting from Open Source. This is an effort to give managers a compass when embarking on the terrains of Open Source. Despite that the failure to identify a reliable and predictable factor of resolution time, this dissertation proves that software age, programming language, software complexity and the number of core maintainers in a project do not influence resolution time. The most significant discovery in this paper is how maintenance behaviour such as participation inequality and cross-bug connectivity influences the resolution of bugs. The result shows that participation inequality expedites defect fixing, and that there exists an optimal level of contributions, which influence the rate of resolution on feature requests. This Another discovery in this paper is the rate of response of the Open Source volunteers to bug resolution. Typically, it takes an average of over 40 days for maintainers to respond. So, for marketers of OSS support services, this presents a powerful message in their marketing campaign

Avoimen lähdekoodin lisenssien ominaisuuksien vaikutukset ohjelmistoarkkitehtuuriin

Open source licenses enable software developers to co-operate with unknown developers to modify and redistribute software without direct fnancial costs to themselves. Detecting the actual licenses and copyright holders of open source components can be difficult and open source licenses can conflict with each other and can make profiting from open source difficult. Current license compliance methods do not take into account all open source license properties. Some developers are afraid to use open source, because they do not understand open source license properties or license management methods. In the OSSLI project current understanding of the different effects of open source license properties on software engineering was gathered by a systematic literature review. This thesis uses the results of the literature review, ontologies and general system theory to construct a framework to show how the properties of open source licenses affect software architecture. This OSSLI framework consists of the abstract legal system, procedural legal system, software architecture system, software engineering system, business system and social system. This thesis uses the OSSLI framework to evaluate current methods and tools to manage open source license issues and shows how the OSSLI framework was used in the research project to design a new tool to manage open source license compliance through software architecture. The OSSLI framework showed its utility in understanding the effects of open source license properties.Avoimen lähdekoodin lisenssien avulla ohjelmistokehittäjät voivat yhteistyössä toisilleen tuntemattomien kehittäjien kanssa jatkokehittää ja levittää ohjelmistoja maksamatta erillistä rahallista korvausta. Avoimen lähdekoodin lisenssit voivat kuitenkin olla vaikeaselkoisia ja haitata ohjelmiston hyödyntämistä kaupallisesti sekä eri lisenssien ominaisuudet voivat olla ristiriidassa keskenään. Nykyiset lisenssien hallintamenetelmät eivät ota huomioon kaikkia avoimen lähdekoodin lisenssien ominaisuuksia ja komponenttien todellisen tekijänoikeuksien varmistaminen voi olla vaikeaa. Kaikki ohjelmistokehittäjät eivät uskalla käyttää avointa lähdekoodia, koska eivät ymmärrä avoimen lähdekoodin lisenssien ominaisuuksia tai niiden hallintamenetelmiä. OSSLI-tukimusprojektissa kerättiin systemaattisen kirjallisuuskatsauksen avulla tietoa tieteellisen tutkimuksen nykyisestä käsityksestä avoimen lähdekoodin lisenssien vaikutuksista ohjelmistotuotantoon. Tämä diplomityö muodostaa kirjallisuuskatsauksen löydösten, ontologioiden ja yleisen systeemisteorian avulla kehyksen, jolla hahmotetaan avoimen lähdekoodin lisenssien ominaisuuksien vaikutuksista ohjelmistoarkkiehtuuriin. Tämä OSSLI-kehys rakentuu abstraktista ja sovelletusta laista, ohjelmistoarkkiehtuurista, ohjelmistokehityksestä, liiketoiminnasta ja sosiaalisesta verkostosta sekä huomioi myös lisenssien ominaisuudet. Diplomityössä arvioidaan OSSLI-kehyksen avulla avoimien lähdekoodien lisenssien riskien hallintaan käytettyjen työkaluja ja menetelmiä sekä kuvataan miten tutkimusprojektissa kehystä käytettiin uuden ohjelmistoarkkitehtuuritason lisenssienhallintatyökalun kehittämiseen. OSSLI-kehys osoitti hyödyllisyytensä avoimen lähdekoodin lisenssien ominaisuuksien vaikutusten ymmärtämiseen

Open Source Software and the “Private-Collective” Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science

Currently two models of innovation are prevalent in organization science. The "private investment" model assumes returns to the innovator results from private goods and efficient regimes of intellectual property protection. The "collective action" model assumes that under conditions of market failure, innovators collaborate in order to produce a public good. The phenomenon of open source software development shows that users program to solve their own as well as shared technical problems, and freely reveal their innovations without appropriating private returns from selling the software. In this paper we propose that open source software development is an exemplar of a compound model of innovation that contains elements of both the private investment and the collective action models. We describe a new set of research questions this model raises for scholars in organization science. We offer some details regarding the types of data available for open source projects in order to ease access for researchers who are unfamiliar with these, and als