Data Mining User Activity in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)/ Open Learning Management Systems

Student involvement in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) holds the potential to support a wide range software engineering education topics from requirements to design to testing and more. In addition, participation in a FOSS project exposes students to large, complex software projects and real-world development teams and environments like those that they will typically see after graduation. However, identifying a project appropriate for student involvement can be a difficult task. There are a huge number of possible FOSS projects with a wide range of sizes, complexity, and domains. The presenters of this workshop have developed an approach to FOSS project identification [1] which is based on several years of experience with student participation in FOSS projects. The approach is based on humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) as those projects have been shown to motivate students [2]. During the workshop, key criteria for evaluating a FOSS project will be presented, along with a rubric. This workshop will interactively walk participants through the process of identifying and evaluating a project appropriate for their classes based on the criteria and rubric.

Systematic review of free and open source software (FOSS) employed in ecomorphological studies with recommendations for user-friendly developments

Excerpt: Worldwide, governments are growingly focusing on free and open source software (FOSS) as a move toward transparency and the freedom to run, copy, study, change and improve the software. The European Commission (EC) is also supporting the development of FOSS [...]. In addition to the financial savings, FOSS contributes to scientific knowledge freedom in computational science (CS) and is increasingly rewarded in the science-policy interface within the emerging paradigm of open science. Since complex computational science applications may be affected by software uncertainty, FOSS may help to mitigate part of the impact of software errors by CS community- driven open review, correction and evolution of scientific code. The continental scale of EC science-based policy support implies wide networks of scientific collaboration. Thematic information systems also may benefit from this approach within reproducible integrated modelling. This is supported by the EC strategy on FOSS: the development of new information systems, where deployment is foreseen by parties outside of the EC infrastructure, [F]OSS will be the preferred choice and in any case used whenever possible. The aim of this contribution is to highlight how a continental scale information system may exploit and integrate FOSS technologies within the transdisciplinary research underpinning such a complex system. A European example is discussed where FOSS innervates both the structure of the information system itself and the inherent transdisciplinary research for modelling the data and information which constitute the system content. [...]

We have attempted to create affordable programmable logical controllers (PLC) that can be used to train millions of students in developing countries. Version 1 of the PLC is based on AtMega16 and costs 600 ($10). Using the free and open source software (FOSS) LD Micro, one can learn ladder logic. To enhance the capabilities, using Raspberry PI, Version 2 of the PLC, costing 1,500 ($25) is made. We can use this device with the FOSS OpenPLC to learn ladder logic. We can also learn function block based programming using the FOSS 4DIAC. As ladder logic and function block based programming are industrial standards, students trained using our approach will be useful to industry.

Recently, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has emerged as an alternative to Commercial-Off- The-Shelf (COTS) software. Now, FOSS is perceived as a viable long-term solution that deserves careful consideration because of its potential for significant cost savings, improved reliability, and numerous advantages over proprietary software. However, the secure integration of FOSS in IT infrastructures is very challenging and demanding. Methodologies and technical policies must be adapted to reliably compose large FOSS-based software systems. A DRDC Valcartier-Concordia University feasibility study completed in March 2004 concluded that the most promising approach for securing FOSS is to combine advanced design patterns and Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). Following the recommendations of this study a three years project have been conducted as a collaboration between Concordia University, DRDC Valcartier, and Bell Canada. This paper aims at presenting the main contributions of this project. It consists of a practical framework with the underlying solid semantic foundations for the security evaluation and hardening of FOSS.

Assessing User eXperience (UX) maturity is mandatory in the free and open-source software (FOSS) community to avoid wasting resources on projects that may fall short of expectations. Best practices suggest employing UX Capability Maturity Models (UXCMMs), which often specify an evolutionary plateau toward developing a UX-matured system and quantify organizational UX maturity into maturity levels ranging from no or ad hoc improvement to integrated continuous improvement. Numerous generically developed UXCMMs exist. However, none is created for the FOSS community, and less information is available to support their perfect match. Thus, raise suspicions if they have proper UX maturity influencing factors (UXMIFs) for the FOSS community or measure the right thing. The FOSS community differs from traditional software-developing communities and may have different dynamics and UXMIFs, necessitating unique and new methodologies for their discovery. This study, therefore, aims to identify the FOSS community’s UXMIFs and evaluate the community’s knowledge of UX maturity-related concepts. Its findings may help future researchers, practitioners, and other FOSS developers to develop UXCMMs exclusive to the FOSS community. The study’s design is both qualitative and quantitative. It adopted a systematic literature review, interviews, fuzzy Delphi Method, and thematic analysis to collect and analyze data and present the findings. The study’s sample included sixty-two active FOSS projects, fifteen FOSS stakeholders, and twelve UX experts. The outcome shows that 84% of UX experts agreed on the thirty-six FOSS’s UXMIFs with threshold d = 0.143 and crisp values greater than α-cut = 0.5. User feedback and adopted technologies were ranked first, while learnability and use speed were ranked last. Similarly, FOSS stakeholders have shown a shared understanding of UX maturity, connected concepts, and impacting factors.

With the growth of free and open source software (FOSS) and the adoption of FOSS solutions in business and everyday life, it is important that projects serve their growingly diverse user base. The sustainability of FOSS projects relies on a constant influx of new contributors. Several large demographic surveys found that FOSS communities are very homogenous, dominated by young men, similar to the bias existing in the rest of the IT workforce. Building on previous research, we examine mailing list subscriptions and posting statistics of female FOSS participants. New participants often experience their first interaction on a FOSS project’s mailing list. We explored six FOSS projects – Buildroot, Busybox, Jaws, Parrot, uClibc, and Yum. We found a declining rate of female participation from the 8.27% of subscribers, to 6.63% of posters, and finally the often reported code contributor rate of 1.5%. We found a disproportionate attrition rate among women along every step of the FOSS joining process.

This report discusses legal questions raised by licenses in the field of free and open source software (FOSS) and other alternative license models from a comparative perspective. It summarizes and juxtaposes national reports on said licensing schemes from 25 different jurisdictions. To begin with, the report provides general information on FOSS and alternative licensing such as relevant legislation and case-law (Sect. 17.2). It then continues to analyse FOSS and other alternative licenses in the light of contract law (Sect. 17.4) and copyright law (Sect. 17.3). For example, it addresses the questions whether alternative licenses are construed as contracts or unilateral acts and whether they contradict an author”s statutory right for equitable remuneration. Moreover, the report briefly deals with other related aspects such as potential conflicts with patent and trademark claims (Sect. 17.5). It comes to the conclusion (Sect. 17.6) that many of the legal uncertainties that FOSS and other alternative licenses like creative commons faced in the past have been resolved. However, new questions have arisen and deserve further scrutiny in the future.

The mainstreaming of Free and Open Source Software(FOSS) has been one of the most visible changes in the domain of software in the last decade. Starting out as a rallying point for techno-activists, FOSS is today a valued option supported by Governments, Businesses as well as the civil society in most parts of the word. The State of Kerala in southern India, already quite unique on a variety of social, democratic and political indicators, was the first to adopt FOSS as an instrument of State policy in 2001. As it celebrates a decade of FOSS in 2011, Kerala demonstrates the remarkable transition of FOSS into a cost-effective, pragmatic, and technologically sound strategy that simultaneously upholds the principles of freedom and democracy. Given that software is set to permeate most aspects of humanendeavor, the use of FOSS is an example for a highly sustainable-socially, politically and technologically-model of use of ICTs for humanity.

Many developing countries around the world are frequently confronted with a dual challenge of simultaneously developing IT infrastructure and implementing software solutions. Some countries have successfully created extensive information technology infrastructures, yet software use continues to be reliant on pirated sources. The experiences of licensing regulation violations and increasing virus attacks indicate that part of the problem is a consequence of dependencies created by the use of proprietary software within resource-scarce economies. Recent growth in the use of free and open-source software (FOSS) by various public- and private-sector agencies suggests an alternative path to software self-sufficiency for a resource-scarce country like Cuba. There is, however, an interesting background to current software use within Cuba that makes it unique among several less-developed countries. Apart from the well-known advantages, FOSS use could be essential to shape the future scenario of Cuba. The present paper first delineates some of the Cuban background, basically characterized by lack of freedom in technology ownership and access to external information. The potential of FOSS use within existing conditions in Cuba is then analyzed. Finally, conclusions are provided on the basis of a survey carried out in Cuba, arguing that there needs to be stronger political will to reduce gaps between goals and implementation reality to achieve intrinsic advantages of FOSS use successfully.

The South African cabinet adopted policy recommendations from the Government Information Technology Officer's Council pertaining to Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS). Even though the South African Cabinet has shown support for the use of FOSS through the enactment of a policy, the adoption of open source software in electronic records management seems to be slow. Proprietary software continues to be adopted and used by most public institutions, including local and provincial municipalities in South Africa. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate factors that may influence the adoption and use of FOSS for electronic records management by South African municipalities. The study adopted a qualitative research approach to collect data from 10 purposively selected municipalities in Gauteng. Data were analysed and presented thematically to address the research question. The findings of this study suggest that municipalities in Gauteng are not adopting FOSS for electronic records management as expected. This study established that top management support, reliability, affordability of the software, inadequate capability, contracts with proprietary software providers, organisational culture and organisational support are some of the factors that contributed to the low uptake when it comes to the adoption of Free and Open-Source Software by the municipalities.

The rise of Web 2.0 and the current, unprecedented diffusion of mobile devices have laid new foundations for the development of PGIS (Participatory GIS). This study evaluates the possibility of exploiting FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) tools to build up a PGIS prototype providing Web publication of user field-collected data. Besides increasing public awareness and collaboration, user-generated content should also enlarge the knowledge of specific phenomena up to the local level. A prototype architecture was designed and tested in relation to a simple, planning-related case study, i.e., the report of road pavement damages. Open Data Kit suite was used to gather georeferenced multimedia data using mobile device sensors (e.g., the GPS) and to store them into a PostgreSQL database with PostGIS spatial extension. Data was then Web-published using GeoServer. Web access was finally enabled from both traditional desktop-computers and mobile plat forms through ad hoc OpenLayers and Leaflet clientside solutions. The architecture provided support for FOSS applicability within the typical PGIS-related tasks, from field survey to data storage, management and dissemination on the Internet. This bottom-up communication paradigm, which exploits real-time, freely available user contributions, can become a potentially precious tool for making decision-processes more democratic, faster and ultimately better.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is not only seen by computer science departments as an optional free and low cost technology to support their IT infrastructure and administrative duties, but also as a methodology to improve pedagogy and provide opportunities for students to learn. As a result, many teachers are turning to FOSS projects and communities as effective tools to teach computer science courses and give their students significant real-world experience. However, few teaching and learning models exist that can help computer science teachers provide guidance and mentorship for their students' involvement in FOSS projects. In order to address this gap in computer science education, this paper presents a teaching and learning model that was evaluated using a series of pilot studies conducted with software engineering students. Experiences and lessons learnt from the pilot studies shows one possible way teachers can guide students' involvement in FOSS projects and how this approach can be integrated into a formally structured curriculum. Index Terms—Capstone projects, computer science education, curriculum design, open source software communities, open source software projects, software engineering.

Participating in free and open source software (FOSS) has numerous benefits for students (and faculty), and there is increasing interest in encouraging such participation. There is a broad range of possible contributions to FOSS projects including documentation, testing, coding, and more. This range allows people with a variety of backgrounds, including little or no CS background, to contribute to a FOSS project. This poster describes the status of a project to identify and categorize learning activities that contribute to FOSS. During Spring 2011, an NSF-sponsored workshop on student participation in humanitarian FOSS for the SoftHum project brought together a group of experienced FOSS developers, faculty, and students. One result of this workshop was a list of nearly 100 learning activities that could contribute to FOSS projects and provide meaningful experiences for students and faculty. We were surprised by the variety of results. Some of the activities have been used successfully or are variations of familiar learning activities; others are ideas that seem promising but require further development and validation. We are experimenting with individual activities, and seeking colleagues interested in doing likewise. We are also mapping the learning activities onto Computer Science Curriculum 2008 to make it easier for faculty to identify relevant activities and map them to course or program learning objectives. The poster briefly summarizes relevant background, describe the process used to identify appropriate activities and provide examples of activities and their mappings.

This article seeks to understand the authorial personas of free and open source software (FOSS) programmers as shaped by their licensing schemes. It argues that neither the Romantic author-vision nor the postmodern authorless creativity is suitable for defining FOSS programmers’ authorial consciousness. Instead, it finds that the sociologist Richard Sennett’s ‘craftsmanship’ theory—which explains craftsmen’s intrinsic motive to do a job well for its own sake—is more adequate for addressing these programmers’ authorial personas. The craftsmanship persona is also reflected in the prevalent ‘attribution’ clause in FOSS licensing, which enables the peer assessment of the quality of programmers’ work associated with their reputation. It is proposed that FOSS authors’ attributional interests should depart from their copyright ownership and be re-anchored in their stewardship of the relevant projects, which are taken care of under FOSS programmer-craftsmen’s authorial responsibility.