What's all the FOSS?

Author(s):  
Jason B. Huett ◽  
Jason H. Sharp ◽  
Kimberly C. Huett

Philosophical, financial, practical, and pedagogical considerations have prompted educators to take a serious look at Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) as an alternative to proprietary software. To better understand the overall concept of FOSS, this article provides a brief history of FOSS as well as a summary of its definition, philosophy, and major areas of research, including strengths and limitations, diffusion in education and educational uses as well as a look at the opportunities, issues, and challenges associated with FOSS. In conclusion, the authors speculate how FOSS, along with advances in E-Learning and other emerging technologies, will positively shape our educational future.

Author(s):  
Jason B. Huett ◽  
Jason H. Sharp ◽  
Kimberly C. Huett

Philosophical, financial, practical, and pedagogical considerations have prompted educators to take a serious look at Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) as an alternative to proprietary software. To better understand the overall concept of FOSS, this article provides a brief history of FOSS as well as a summary of its definition, philosophy, and major areas of research, including strengths and limitations, diffusion in education and educational uses as well as a look at the opportunities, issues, and challenges associated with FOSS. In conclusion, the authors speculate how FOSS, along with advances in E-Learning and other emerging technologies, will positively shape our educational future.


Author(s):  
Brian Still

This chapter serves as an introductory overview of Open Source Software (OSS) and the Open Source movement. It is geared primarily for technical communicators. To provide a thorough overview, this chapter defines OSS, explains how OSS works in comparison to proprietary software, looks at the history of OSS, and examines OSS licensing types, applications in business, and overall strengths and weaknesses when compared to proprietary software. Lastly, it evaluates the practical potential of OSS as well as emerging and future trends relating to it. From this general but thorough overview the intended audience of technical communicators will gain the solid understanding needed to work successfully in an academic or professional environment where OSS continues to grow in popularity, spurring more organizations to rely on it or the Open Source ideas that have inspired and continue to drive its creation and growth.


Author(s):  
Dilek Karahoca ◽  
Adem Karahoca ◽  
Ilker Yengin ◽  
Huseyin Uzunboylu

This chapter explains the developmental reasons and design to implementation cycles of the Computer Assisted Active Learning System (CALS) for History of Civilization (HOC) courses at Engineering Faculty of Bahcesehir University. Implementation purpose of CALS is to develop set of tools in a systematic way to enhance students’ critical thinking abilities for HOC courses. Dynamic meta-cognitive maps, movies, flash cards and quiz tools were developed. In order to reduce implementation costs of CALS, open Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) standards and platforms were utilized in the development and implementation cycles. This study also investigates the importance of the e-learning platform usage in HOC courses in Engineering Faculty of Bahcesehir University to improve the level of students. Results indicate that the concept based meta-cognitive tool improves learning instead of students just memorizing the class material. Also, engineering students improved their positive attitude towards who wants to learn the history of civilization by using CALS. This study shows that software helps to change human behavior in the learning cycle. This chapter highlights the implications of successful development of FOSS for the CALS.


Author(s):  
Brian Still

This chapter serves as an introductory overview of Open Source Software (OSS) and the Open Source movement. It is geared primarily for technical communicators. To provide a thorough overview, this chapter defines OSS, explains how OSS works in comparison to proprietary software, looks at the history of OSS, and examines OSS licensing types, applications in business, and overall strengths and weaknesses when compared to proprietary software. Lastly, it evaluates the practical potential of OSS as well as emerging and future trends relating to it. From this general but thorough overview the intended audience of technical communicators will gain the solid understanding needed to work successfully in an academic or professional environment where OSS continues to grow in popularity, spurring more organizations to rely on it or the Open Source ideas that have inspired and continue to drive its creation and growth.


2008 ◽  
pp. 239-253
Author(s):  
Brian Still

This chapter serves as an introductory overview of Open Source Software (OSS) and the Open Source movement. It is geared primarily for technical communicators. To provide a thorough overview, this chapter defines OSS, explains how OSS works in comparison to proprietary software, looks at the history of OSS, and examines OSS licensing types, applications in business, and overall strengths and weaknesses when compared to proprietary software. Lastly, it evaluates the practical potential of OSS as well as emerging and future trends relating to it. From this general but thorough overview the intended audience of technical communicators will gain the solid understanding needed to work successfully in an academic or professional environment where OSS continues to grow in popularity, spurring more organizations to rely on it or the Open Source ideas that have inspired and continue to drive its creation and growth.


2021 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 43-54
Author(s):  
Mahlatse Shekgola ◽  
Jan Maluleka ◽  
Antonio Rodrigues

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-128
Author(s):  
Syed Nadeem Ahsan ◽  
Muhammad Tanvir Afzal ◽  
Safdar Zaman ◽  
Christian Gütel ◽  
Franz Wotawa

During the evolution of any software, efforts are made to fix bugs or to add new features in software. In software engineering, previous history of effort data is required to build an effort estimation model, which estimates the cost and complexity of any software. Therefore, the role of effort data is indispensable to build state-of-the-art effort estimation models. Most of the Open Source Software does not maintain any effort related information. Consequently there is no state-of-the-art effort estimation model for Open Source Software, whereas most of the existing effort models are for commercial software. In this paper we present an approach to build an effort estimation model for Open Source Software. For this purpose we suggest to mine effort data from the history of the developer’s bug fix activities. Our approach determines the actual time spend to fix a bug, and considers it as an estimated effort. Initially, we use the developer’s bug-fix-activity data to construct the developer’s activity log-book. The log-book is used to store the actual time elapsed to fix a bug. Subsequently, the log-book information is used to mine the bug fix effort data. Furthermore, the developer’s bug fix activity data is used to define three different measures for the developer’s contribution or expertise level. Finally, we used the bug-fix-activity data to visualize the developer’s collaborations and the involved source files. In order to perform an experiment we selected the Mozilla open source project and downloaded 93,607 bug reports from the Mozilla project bug tracking system i.e., Bugzilla. We also downloaded the available CVS-log data from the Mozilla project repository. In this study we reveal that in case of Mozilla only 4.9% developers have been involved in fixing 71.5% of the reported bugs.


Author(s):  
Abubakar Diwani Bakar ◽  
Abu Bakar Md. Sultan ◽  
Hazura Zulzalil ◽  
Jamilah Din

The African continent has long benefited from adopting OSS in its private and public organizations that have changed their way of development, the use and how to acquire proprietary software. This frequency of adaptation does not appear to be in balance with the contribution to the OSS community. Using views from experienced software practitioners working in different organizations across two African countries it has been observed that neglected infrastructure, a wide availability of proprietary software and misconceptions of a clear meaning of Open Source Software across Africa have been an obstacle towards the participation in the OSS technology in the global network.


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