Capability Coordination in Modular Organization: Voluntary FS/OSS Production and the Case of Debian GNU/Linux

The paper analyzes voluntary Free Software/Open Source Software (FS/OSS) organization of work. The empirical setting considered is the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. The paper finds that the production process is hierarchical notwithstanding the modular (nearly decomposable) architecture of software and of voluntary FS/OSS organization. But voluntary FS/OSS project organization is not hierarchical for the same reasons suggested by the most familiar theories of economic organization: hierarchy is justified for coordination of continuous change, rather than for the direction of static production. Hierarchy is ultimately the overhead attached to the benefits engendered by modular organization.Modularity, hierarchy, capabilities, coordination costs, software.

An Open Source Software Directory for Aeronautics and Space

In aerospace engineering, as well as in many other disciplines, many software tools are developed. Often, it is hard to get an overview of already existing software. Sometimes this leads to multiple development of software, if nobody is able to determine whether a software for a specifi�c tasks exist already or not. Therefore, in companies and organizations there is a need for a directory of exiting software. The German Aerospace Center has built such a directory based on the Open Source software Allura, which is the base software that drives the Open Source hosting platform SourceForge.net. Allura has been customized to the needs of the aerospace domain. The result is a software portal for the aerospace research community, that allow to register and categorize software. It is intended to be used both for Open Source and proprietary software. Employees of the German Aerospace Center as well as the public can search for existing software. This reduces the amount of software developed twice and allows to get in touch with colleagues who developed similar software

The market for open source: An intelligent virtual open source marketplace

This paper describes the MARKOS (the MARKet for Open Source) European Project, a FP7-ICT-2011-8 STREP project, which aims to realize a service and an interactive application providing an integrated view on the open source projects available on the web, focusing on functional, structural, and licenses aspects of software source code. MARKOS involves 7 partners from 5 countries, including industries, universities, and research institutions. MARKOS differs from other services available on the Web - which often provide textual-based code search - in that it provides the possibility to browse the code structure at a high level of abstraction, in order to facilitate the understanding of the software from a technical point of view. Also, it highlights relationships between software components released by different projects, giving an integrated view of the available Open Source software at a global scale. Last, but not least, MARKOS is able to highlight potential legal issues due to license incompatibilities, providing explanations for these issues and supporting developers in the search for alternative solutions to their problems. MARKOS will involve end users in order to allow to practice its results in scenarios coming from industrial and Open Source communities