The Open Source Community Choice

Open source communities have had and continue to have a major influence on the evolution of the Internet. By their nature, such communities involve people with diverse coding cultures and skills. Automation has consequently been of major interest to open source software developers for a long time, and many open source tools have been developed to address code variability and sustainability challenges. This chapter discusses why open source communities must automate and the challenges they will face. Solutions and current examples of automation in open source projects are provided as a guide to what is achievable. OpenShift, OpenStack, and OPNFV communities are used to illustrate different approaches and best practices. Two recently initiated automation initiatives are detailed: “Cross Community Continuous Integration” (XCI) and “Cross Testing” (Xtesting). Finally, some recommendations are provided for new projects as a guide to ease adoption of appropriate tools and methods.

Share and share unlike: Reciprocity, corporate power, and the open source ethos

The “open source” model initially emerged as a way for programmers to collaborate on efforts to build and share code, but has since evolved to embody an ethos of sharing and cooperation that pervades software development as a whole. As many technologists have seen, however, a philosophy of openness can leave them vulnerable to attempts by large corporations to use the norms of open source communities for their own benefits. This article examines the breach of social trust that occurs when companies do not fulfill expectations of reciprocity in their relationships with open source communities, and instead attempt to co-opt their work for monetary gain. Through analysis of three case studies, I seek to emphasize the often misleading nature of these processes and show that they are directly incorporated into the business models of large corporations, even if they are not openly acknowledged as such.

Standard setting organizations and open source communities: Partners or competitors?

Standardization serves a as a means to improve overall quality of life through the economies of scale gained from the pervasive adoption of technical solutions. It enables competition by facilitating interoperability between products of different vendors. The wider open source community develops free and open source software (FOSS) in a global upstream/downstream model that similarly benefits society as a public good. FOSS and standards setting organizations (SSOs) are both instruments causing standardizing effects. Innovators and policy-makers assume that a mutually beneficial collaboration between them is desirable. However, their exact relationship is not fully understood, especially when and how FOSS and SSOs complement each other, or displace each other as competitors. To be able to compare FOSS and SSOs, our study develops a phase model of standardization that is applicable to both approaches, and applies this model to compare the strengths and weaknesses of FOSS and SSOs against common opportunities and threats in the ICT sector. Based on qualitative expert interviews with FOSS and SSO representatives, the synthesis of the separate results support conclusions from a product, a process and a societal perspective. The study identifies cost of change as a key determinant for the efficacy of each approach. It concludes that FOSS and SSOs create complementary products, compete for efficiency of the standardization process, and are both independent and complementary standardization instruments available to industry and influenceable by policy-makers. The paper closes with a discussion of possible implications relevant to businesses, the wider open source community, SSOs and policy-makers.

Unsettled Issues Regarding Autonomous Vehicles and Open-source Software

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.

Digital Forensics Analysis of Ubuntu Touch on PinePhone

New smartphones made by small companies enter the technology market everyday. These new devices introduce new challenges for mobile forensic investigators as these devices end up becoming pertinent evidence during an investigation. One such device is the PinePhone from Pine Microsystems (Pine64). These new devices are sometimes also shipped with OSes that are developed by open source communities and are otherwise never seen by investigators. Ubuntu Touch is one of these OSes and is currently being developed for deployment on the PinePhone. There is little research behind both the device and OS on what methodology an investigator should follow to reliably and accurately extract data. This results in potentially flawed methodologies being used before any testing can occur and contributes to the backlog of devices that need to be processed. Therefore, in this paper, the first forensic analysis of the PinePhone device with Ubuntu Touch OS is performed using Autopsy, an open source tool, to establish a framework that can be used to examine and analyze devices running the Ubuntu Touch OS. The findings include analysis of artifacts that could impact user privacy and data security, organization structure of file storage, app storage, OS, etc. Moreover, locations within the device that stores call logs, SMS messages, images, and videos are reported. Interesting findings include forensic artifacts, which could be useful to investigators in understanding user activity and attribution. This research will provide a roadmap to the digital forensic investigators to efficiently and effectively conduct their investigations where they have Ubuntu Touch OS and/or PinePhone as the evidence source.

Communities of making: Exploring parallels between fandom and open source

Studies of social media frequently focus on the most popular platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) and fail to consider more unconventional platforms and communities that nevertheless fit the criteria of social media. A comparison of fan communities emphasizing different content structures (Archive of Our Own, DeviantArt, and Fanfiction.net) to open source community platform GitHub can provide insight into the practices of communities of making, regardless of even substantial differences in purposes and affordances, while expanding the traditional definition of social media. Study of both fan and open source communities revealed commonalities across platforms, such as non-market practices with deep market ties; gift economies that run on status; and a lack of inclusivity. We argue that the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, labor, and value on social media platforms can be illuminated by putting these platforms and their communities into conversation.