The Legal Issues Surrounding Free and Open Source Software: Challenges and Solutions for the Government of Québec

The Government of Québec is slowly but surely turning its attention to the issue of free and open source software in response to the interest shown by Québec’s software industry and the attention paid to the phenomenon by governments around the world. This openness is easy to understand given an environment in which online service provision to citizens must be enhanced while minimizing expenditures on technology, curtailing service providers’ control over the administration, and promoting the development of the information society in Québec. Nonetheless, as we see in the news, adoption of this new attitude toward to software development is not always immune to legal challenges. Consequently, the manner in which Québec law interacts with free and open source software, as well as the associated risks, assume a particular significance. The analysis we present here reveals that the law, as it currently stands in Québec, appears adequate to effectively address the various legal issues inherent in the use of free and open source software. First of all, no legal rule seems to be incompatible with the validity of free and open source licences, despite that fact that few of them were designed with the Québec legal system in mind. Moreover, both federal copyright rules and Québec regulations affecting contractual liability allow the authors and users of free and open source software to effectively preserve the freedom of computer code, which is typically the purpose of free and open source licences. Nonetheless, it remains the case that some legal risks are associated with free and open source software. These risks may arise from the formalism requirements included in the Copyright Act, prior violations of intellectual property rights by third parties, or simply from the broader contractual protection afforded to licensors. Consequently, integrating free and open source software into the technology strategy of the Government of Québec requires setting up some initiatives to allow these risks to be mitigated as much as possible and to enable the management of those risks that cannot be completely eliminated.

Lessons learned in developing a Second Life educational environment

Virtual worlds are rapidly spreading beyond gaming and entertainment into education and the corporate world. Should this trend continue, as forecast by the industry, then immersive applications will become more prominent, with bespoke software developed in the metaverse affording both opportunities and challenges. This paper reflects on the experience of developing a learning virtual space based on Second Life as part of an innovation project at The Open University, UK. The paper focuses on the lessons learnt from the viewpoint of managing the development of the learning environment, and could be of benefit to educators and educational technologists who are thinking to engage in this sort of development

Creating Tailored and Adaptive Network Services with the Open Orchestration C-RAN Framework

Next generation wireless communications networks will leverage software-defined radio and networking technologies, combined with cloud and fog computing. A pool of resources can then be dynamically allocated to create personalized network services (NSs). The enabling technologies are abstraction, virtualization and consolidation of resources, automatization of processes, and programmatic provisioning and orchestration. ETSI's network functions virtualization (NFV) management and orchestration (MANO) framework provides the architecture and specifications of the management layers. We introduce OOCRAN, an open-source software framework and testbed that extends existing NFV management solutions by incorporating the radio communications layers. This paper presents OOCRAN and illustrates how it monitors and manages the pool of resources for creating tailored NSs. OOCRAN can automate NS reconfiguration, but also facilitates user control. We demonstrate the dynamic deployment of cellular NSs and discuss the challenges of dynamically creating and managing tailored NSs on shared infrastructure.Comment: IEEE 5G World Forum 201

Ten Simple Rules to Enable Multi-site Collaborations through Data Sharing

Open access, open data, and software are critical for advancing science and enabling collaboration across multiple institutions and throughout the world. Despite near universal recognition of its importance, major barriers still exist to sharing raw data, software, and research products throughout the scientific community. Many of these barriers vary by specialty [1], increasing the difficulties for interdisciplinary and/or translational researchers to engage in collaborative research. Multi-site collaborations are vital for increasing both the impact and the generalizability of research results. However, they often present unique data sharing challenges. We discuss enabling multi-site collaborations through enhanced data sharing in this set of Ten Simple Rules

Republishing OpenStreetMap’s roads as linked routable tiles

Route planning providers manually integrate different geo-spatial datasets before offering a Web service to developers, thus creating a closed world view. In contrast, combining open datasets at runtime can provide more information for user-specific route planning needs. For example, an extra dataset of bike sharing availabilities may provide more relevant information to the occasional cyclist. A strategy for automating the adoption of open geo-spatial datasets is needed to allow an ecosystem of route planners able to answer more specific and complex queries. This raises new challenges such as (i) how open geo-spatial datasets should be published on the Web to raise interoperability, and (ii) how route planners can discover and integrate relevant data for a certain query on the fly. We republished OpenStreetMap's road network as "Routable Tiles" to facilitate its integration into open route planners. To achieve this, we use a Linked Data strategy and follow an approach similar to vector tiles. In a demo, we show how client-side code can automatically discover tiles and perform a shortest path algorithm. We provide four contributions: (i) we launched an open geo-spatial dataset that is available for everyone to reuse at no cost, (ii) we published a Linked Data version of the OpenStreetMap ontology, (iii) we introduced a hypermedia specification for vector tiles that extends the Hydra ontology, and (iv) we released the mapping scripts, demo and routing scripts as open source software

Sustainability of Community-owned Repository Software: A Call to Action

CNI 2017 Spring Membership MeetingSustainability of open-source software is a continual challenge in the relatively small world of cultural heritage institutions. The challenge is amplified due to the critical preservation implications tied to institutional commitments; cultural heritage institutions are expected to preserve and provide access to repository-held data into the foreseeable future, and yet our models for shared software governance are relatively immature, and commitments to software sustainability ebb and flow over time. The cultural, financial, and philosophical dimensions of the community surrounding the software play as much, if not more, of a role in a project’s sustainability as the technology itself. With a collective thirty years of experience grappling with these challenges, the speakers will offer varied perspectives on approaches to ensuring the software that supports the long-term preservation and accessibility of our digital heritage will still exist tomorrow. This session will dive deeper into the specific challenges faced by a few open-source repository software communities, outlining what the Islandora, Hydra, and Fedora communities have done to address sustainability in their projects, past and present, and how well these measures have succeeded. Specific tactics for engaging in these projects will be offered as a call to action

Revisiting Software Engineering in the Social Era

This paper discusses the possible changes that software engineering will have to go through in response to the challenges and issues associated with social media. Indeed, people have never been so connected like nowadays by forming spontaneous relations with others (even strangers) and engaging in ad-hoc interactions. The Web is the backbone of this new social era – an open, global, ubiquitous, and pervasive platform for today\u27s society and world - suggesting that “everything” can socialize or be socialized. This paper also analyzes the evolution of software engineering as a discipline, points out the characteristics of social systems, and finally presents how these characteristics could affect software engineering\u27s models and practices. It is expected that social systems\u27 characteristics will make software engineering evolve one more time to tackle and address the social era\u27s challenges and issues, respectively

Revisiting Software Engineering in the Social Era

This paper discusses the possible changes that software engineering will have to go through in response to the challenges and issues associated with social media. Indeed, people have never been so connected like nowadays by forming spontaneous relations with others (even strangers) and engaging in ad-hoc interactions. The Web is the backbone of this new social era “ an open, global, ubiquitous, and pervasive platform for today\u27s society and world - suggesting that everything can socialize or be socialized. This paper also analyzes the evolution of software engineering as a discipline, points out the characteristics of social systems, and finally presents how these characteristics could affect software engineering\u27s models and practices. It is expected that social systems\u27 characteristics will make software engineering evolve one more time to tackle and address the social era\u27s challenges and issues, respectively