Open Source Software: Lessons from and for Software Engineering

Software Engineering Lessons from Open Source Projects

The Open Source form of software development has captured the attention of academics and software practitioners alike. Though, this ‘phenomenon’ has been touted by some to be how all software will eventually be developed, many are critical about how far this form of organization will be successful. It is very likely that both the traditional form as well as the Open Source form of organization ...

Open Source Software Engineering

The term Open Source Software (OSS) first appeared in 1998 [1] in an effort to change the popular understanding of what had to that point been called “free software” products like GNU/Linux, Apache, Perl and BIND. In the periods both immediately before and after the coining of the term, many insightful essays appeared both online and in print, attempting to better explain this novel approach to...

Open Source/Open Course Learning: Lessons for Educators from Free and Open Source Software

Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) has transformed the software industry. As noted by other authors in this issue, academic information technology (IT) is already realizing many benefits by adopting open software; such benefits include reduced cost, absence of user restrictions and vendor lock-in, and consistency with traditional academic values of openness and sharing. The greatest benefit of th...

Providing Commercial Open Source Software: Lessons Learned

Even though companies like Sun, IBM, MySQL and others have released several commercial Open Source Software (OSS) products, little evidence exist of how to successfully launch such products and establish a living community around them. This paper presents a case study from a small software company succeeding at establishing a business model and a vivid community around their own OSS products. B...

Open Source Software Development (OSSD) Based On Software Engineering