This article describes the journey from the conception of and vision for a modern searchengine-based search environment to its technological realisation. In doing so, it takes up the thread of an earlier article on this subject, this time from a technical viewpoint. As well as presenting the conceptual considerations of the initial stages, this article will principally elucidate the technologic...

The buzzword “open source software” is gaining in importance and popularity in public, and more and more people are interested in this phenomenon. Yet up until now most of the literature concerning open source has mainly dealt with the technical aspects of the software. The non-technical side, such as discussing the economic aspects in an overall concept, have been neglected thus far. This pape...

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is an imposing business reality but only an emerging discipline of business research. Critical questions have been so far only tangentially investigated and were mostly left to IT columnists and consultants to deal with, generally in a partisan fashion. Such important issues include the viability of FLOSS business models, the impact of FLOSS on the softwa...

This paper describes the recent evolution of business strategies used by companies offering products and services based on free and open source software (FOSS). The primary focus is on companies that develop and release products under an open source license. The paper compares their practices with traditional proprietary software companies and with community-based open source projects, and iden...