Unsettled Issues Regarding Autonomous Vehicles and Open-source Software

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahul Razdan ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Autonomous Systems ◽  
Automotive Applications ◽  
Electronic Components ◽  
Open Source Communities ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Mechanical Objects

As automobiles morph from stand-alone mechanical objects to highly connected, autonomous systems with increasing amounts of electronic components. To manage these complex systems, some semblance of in-car decision-making is also being built and networked to a cloud architecture. This cloud can also enable even deeper capabilities within the broader automotive ecosystem. Unsettled Issues Regarding Autonomous Vehicles and Open-source Software introduces the impact of software in advanced automotive applications, the role of open-source communities in accelerating innovation, and the important topic of safety and cybersecurity. As electronic functionality is captured in software and a bigger percentage of that software is open-source code, some critical challenges arise concerning security and validation.

scholarly journals FIRM DISCOURSES AND DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathieu O'Neil ◽  
Laure Muselli ◽  
Stefano Zacchiroli ◽  
Xiaolan Cai ◽  
Frederic Pailler
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Project Work ◽  
Fully Integrated ◽  
Digital Infrastructure ◽  
Development Costs ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
The World ◽  
Open Source Communities

Free and open source software (a.k.a. FOSS or ‘digital infrastructure’) is now fully integrated into commercial ecosystems. IT firms invest in FOSS in order (a) to share with other firms development costs; (b) to help attract prospective employees in a competitive job market where hiring skilled IT professionals is challenging and (c) to shape the governance and technical orientation of projects: firm employees participating in leading in FOSS projects may help IT firms create digital infrastructure more suited to the firmware they develop atop this infrastructure. How does the world of FOSS volunteers connect to the world of commercial ecosystems? Are firms developing policies in relation to open source communities, requesting projects conform to certain technical or behavioral standards, for example? To what extent are these strategies successful? To answer, we present a qualitative analysis of firm discourses collected during three open source conferences. We then analyze the email discussion lists of Linux and Firefox and search for the occurrence of key firm discourse terms in order to ascertain in what way these discourses are being used by FOSS developers. Our in-depth analysis of firm discourses and exploratory analysis of project discussions around these terms show that the FOSS world encompasses a diversity of industrial outlooks. They also highlight the evolution of the role of foundations: whilst foundations used to protect projects from firm interference, some have now wholly been placed in the service of firm efforts to standardize project work, particularly around the key issue of security.

Developer Centrality and the Impact of Value Congruence and Incongruence on Commitment and Code Contribution Activity in Open Source Software Communities

MIS Quarterly ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 951-976
Author(s):  
Likoebe M. Maruping ◽  
◽  
Sherae L. Daniel ◽  
Marcelo Cataldo ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Value Congruence ◽  
The Impact

scholarly journals MCR: Open-Source Software to Automate Compilation of Health Study Report-Back

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (11) ◽  
pp. 6104
Author(s):  
Erin Polka ◽  
Ellen Childs ◽  
Alexa Friedman ◽  
Kathryn S. Tomsho ◽  
Birgit Claus Henn ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Quality Control ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Research Team ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Health Study ◽  
Equitable Access ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Study Participants ◽  
The Impact

Sharing individualized results with health study participants, a practice we and others refer to as “report-back,” ensures participant access to exposure and health information and may promote health equity. However, the practice of report-back and the content shared is often limited by the time-intensive process of personalizing reports. Software tools that automate creation of individualized reports have been built for specific studies, but are largely not open-source or broadly modifiable. We created an open-source and generalizable tool, called the Macro for the Compilation of Report-backs (MCR), to automate compilation of health study reports. We piloted MCR in two environmental exposure studies in Massachusetts, USA, and interviewed research team members (n = 7) about the impact of MCR on the report-back process. Researchers using MCR created more detailed reports than during manual report-back, including more individualized numerical, text, and graphical results. Using MCR, researchers saved time producing draft and final reports. Researchers also reported feeling more creative in the design process and more confident in report-back quality control. While MCR does not expedite the entire report-back process, we hope that this open-source tool reduces the barriers to personalizing health study reports, promotes more equitable access to individualized data, and advances self-determination among participants.

scholarly journals Knowledge sharing in open source software communities: motivations and management

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-813 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zilia Iskoujina ◽  
Joanne Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Sharing ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Online Questionnaire ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact

Purpose – This paper aims to add to the understanding of knowledge sharing in online communities through an investigation of the relationship between individual participant’s motivations and management in open source software (OSS) communities. Drawing on a review of literature concerning knowledge sharing in organisations, the factors that motivate participants to share their knowledge in OSS communities, and the management of such communities, it is hypothesised that the quality of management influences the extent to which the motivations of members actually result in knowledge sharing. Design/methodology/approach – To test the hypothesis, quantitative data were collected through an online questionnaire survey of OSS web developers with the aim of gathering respondents’ opinions concerning knowledge sharing, motivations to share knowledge and satisfaction with the management of OSS projects. Factor analysis, descriptive analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis were used to explore the survey data. Findings – The analysis of the data reveals that the individual participant’s satisfaction with the management of an OSS project is an important factor influencing the extent of their personal contribution to a community. Originality/value – Little attention has been devoted to understanding the impact of management in OSS communities. Focused on OSS developers specialising in web development, the findings of this paper offer an important original contribution to understanding the connections between individual members’ satisfaction with management and their motivations to contribute to an OSS project. The findings reveal that motivations to share knowledge in online communities are influenced by the quality of management. Consequently, the findings suggest that appropriate management can enhance knowledge sharing in OSS projects and online communities, and organisations more generally.

scholarly journals What can scholars learn from Open Source software communities during pandemics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Tennant ◽  
Tom Crick
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Scholarly Communication ◽  
Social Demand ◽  
Research Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Current Outbreak ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Global Research

When the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak began on January 31, 2020, no-one could have anticipated the impact that it would have on our scholarly communication and publishing systems. That is, perhaps, unless you work on open source software. Right now, global research communities are united to collaborate on solving the threat of the pandemic, sharing resources and knowledge more efficiently and effective than ever before, a process broadly described as ‘open scholarship’ (Dunleavy, 2020). This is essentially akin to how free and open source software (FOSS) communities have been operating now for decades (Willinsky, 2005). Recently, we participated in a “massively open online paper”, or MOOP, that explored the intersections between FOSS and open scholarship (Tennant, Agarwal, et al., 2020). Here, we want to summarise our key findings from that project, and place them in the context of the current outbreak. Critically, this pandemic shows us that many of the pervasive and systemic issues surrounding the evaluation, valuation, use and operationalisation of “openness” in scholarship can be extremely easily bypassed when the social demand and urgency is there, thus showing that the primary barriers towards open scholarship are inherently political and not technical.

Participation in community-based free/libre open source software development tasks: the impact of task characteristics

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kangning Wei ◽  
Kevin Crowston ◽  
U. Yeliz Eseryel
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Task Characteristics ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Individual Participation ◽  
And Task ◽  
Development Tasks

PurposeThis paper explores how task characteristics in terms of trigger type and task topic influence individual participation in community-based free/libre open source software (FLOSS) development by considering participation in individual tasks rather than entire projects.Design/methodology/approachA quantitative study was designed using choose tasks that were carried out via the email discourse on the developers' email fora in five FLOSS projects. Choice process episodes were selected as the unit of analysis and were coded for the task trigger and topic. The impact of these factors on participation (i.e. the numbers of participants and messages) was assessed by regression.FindingsThe results reveal differences in participation related to different task triggers and task topics. Further, the results suggest the mediating role of the number of participants in the relationships between task characteristics and the number of messages. The authors also speculate that project type serves as a boundary condition restricting the impacts of task characteristics on the number of participants and propose this relationship for future research.Research limitations/implicationsEmpirical support was provided to the important effects of different task characteristics on individual participation behaviors in FLOSS development tasks.Practical implicationsThe findings can help FLOSS participants understand participation patterns in different tasks and choose the types of tasks to attend to.Originality/valueThis research explores the impact of task characteristics on participation in FLOSS development at the task level, while prior research on participation in FLOSS development has focused mainly on factors at the individual and/or project levels.

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