Free Software Act

The Free Trade Magic Act

In a recent paper, three economists — Drusilla Brown, Alan Deardoff, and Robert Stern — attempt to calculate the benefits of trade liberalization. They estimate that complete elimination of all trade barriers in the world would add $1.9 trillion (about 5%) to the world's gross economic product by 2005 (Brown, Deardoff, and Stern 2001). Brown-Deardoff-Stern's numbers look convincing, leaving the...

Studying free software with free software and free methods

Free, Libre and Open source software (FLOSS) is an intriguing subject for study. Academic studies of FLOSS have quickly expanded over the past 5 years approaching the topic from software engineering, economics, information systems, sociology, social psychology to name just a few. The pre-print repository at MIT now has over 192 papers and even that is only a small cross-section of the research ...

Autodafé: an Act of Software Torture

Automated vulnerability searching tools have led to a dramatic increase of the rate at which such flaws are discovered. One particular searching technique is fault injection – i.e. insertion of random data into input files, buffers or protocol packets, combined with a systematic monitoring of memory violations. Even if these tools allow to uncover a lot of vulnerabilities, they are still very p...

Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988.

Free/Open Source Software

This position paper provides an overview of the Open Source Software movement and defines how companies can approach, exploit, and learn from it. More specifically, this position paper will first provide the needed details on Open Source licensing models – a key element to be aware of in order to safely approach Open Source. Then, it will provide motivating rationales for getting involved in Op...