<p>The development of software was considered until the beginning of the 1990th as a cathedral like product development in closed companies. This way of development changed in the last decade. Open source software (OSS) development challenged this consideration significantly. OSS is produced in co-operation by skilled people, distributed and used by many moral agents. The result, the software itself, can be studied and modified. Herein is the main incentive for people to develop the software. In such a mode of production the freedom to access knowledge and information (=source code) is a necessity to produce the artifact (software).</p><p>Software is a digital entity. The main difference in comparison to natural resources like oil, land, minerals is that it can be used and reproduced without losses. It lacks the capacity of getting naturally scarce. Contemporary intellectual property rights assume implicitly that goods might getting scarce one day. Imbedded in the term intellectual property is also an idea of "fencing" objects. In this thesis I will argue that anartificial"encing"of digital objects might cause unintentional bad consequences for the society. An other quality intellectual property rights are claimed to have is that they serve as an incentive for inventors/authors to produce new inventions and ideas. The practice of OSS development works without such an incentive provided by intellectual property rights.</p><p>The moral conflict, which I attempt to unravel in this work deals with the question to what extend the application of intellectual property rights in software is necessary and how restrictive particular property rights in digital objects should be - if there should be any at all. Knowledge as the factor of production is of the same value in knowledge societies as land was for agrarian societies. The difference is in the mode of production and the un-limitless availability of digitalized knowledge. I argue that the"protection"of knowledge, and software is knowledge, has to be carefully revised in so called knowledge societies.</p>

<p>Att skriva enhetstester är en viktig del i nya populära systemutvecklingsmetoder som extreme programming. Med testdriven utveckling skriver man testerna innan den källkod som skall testas. Ett vanligt problem med dessa tester är att de blir beroende av delar i systemet som inte är intressant för själva testen. Mock objekt är en teknik som gör det enkelt att isolera tester från allt som inte är relaterat till det som skall testas.</p><p>Det finns två sätt att se på mock objekt. Den traditionella synen är att mock objekt skall användas som ett verktyg vid isolering av externa system. Den alternativa synen är att mock objekt är ett designverktyg som kan driva fram en bättre design i systemet. I denna uppsats utvärderas ett antal mock objekt bibliotek ur detta nyare perspektiv. Resultatet visar att det finns åtskilliga skillnader mellan biblioteken.</p>

<p>Abstract:</p><p>Title: Engelska (Svenska)</p><p>Number of pages: 40 (47 including appendix)</p><p>Author: Carl Strand</p><p>Tutor: Göran Svensson</p><p>Course: Media and Communication Studies C</p><p>Period: Fall 2005</p><p>University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University</p><p>Purpose/Aim: The purpose of this essay is to analyze how young people, in the ages 18 to 25, relate to the subject of file sharing, and what their attitudes to this phenomenon are. I aim to describe how they use file sharing, their knowledge about it, how their usage have changed due to the new copyright law, what their stands are on the question of resource control and management on the Internet, and what they think of the future of file sharing.</p><p>Material/Method: The method being used is a qualitative focus group interview model, used to investigate how young people look at the subject of file sharing. The results of the interviews is then applied to a theoretical framework based on thoughts of Denis McQuail, Lawrence Lessig concerning creativity, copyright, resource management and file sharing on the Internet</p><p>Main Results: My conclusion is that the widespread file sharing habits of young people is not only caused by the temptation of getting free stuff, but of the lack of commercial and legal alternatives. Youths are willing to pay for media if the distribution is superior to the illegal file sharing alternative. They are a generation of young people that has grown up in a society where the tendency in many fields has been to make everything faster and more effective. They want to be able to get everything, and they want it fast. They are what I call the Instant Generation.</p><p>Keywords: File sharing, attitudes, focus groups, Darknet, Open Source, free resources, free creativity</p>

Programmers worldwide share components and jointly develop components on a global scale in contemporary software development. An important aspect of such library-based programming is the need for technical communication with regard to libraries – library communication. As part of their work, programmers must discover, study, and learn as well as debate problems and future development. In this sense, the electronic, networked media has fundamentally changed programming by providing new mechanisms for communication and global interaction through global networks such as the Internet. Today, the baseline for library communication is hypertext documentation. Improvements in quality, efficiency, cost and frustration of the programming activity can be expected by further developments in the electronic aspects of library communication. This thesis addresses the use of the electronic networked medium in the activity of library communication and aims to discover design knowledge for communication tools and processes directed towards this particular area. A model of library communication is provided that describes interaction among programmer as webs of interrelated library communities. A discussion of electronic, networked tools and processes that match such a model is also provided. Furthermore, research results are provided from the design and industrial valuation of electronic reference documentation for the Java domain. Surprisingly, the evaluation did not support individual adaptation (personalization). Furthermore, global library communication processes have been studied in relation to open-source documentation and user-related bug handling. Open-source documentation projects are still relatively uncommon even in open-source software projects. User-related Open-source does not address the passive behavior users have towards bugs. Finally, the adaptive authoring process in electronic reference documentation is addressed and found to provide limited support for expressing the electronic, networked dimensions of authoring requiring programming skill by technical writers. Library communication is addressed here by providing engineering knowledge with regards to the construction of practical electronic, networked tools and processes in the area. Much of the work has been performed in relation to Java library communication and therefore the thesis has particular relevancefor the object-oriented programming domain. A practical contribution of the work is the DJavadoc tool that contributes to the development of reference documentation by providing adaptive Java reference documentation. / On the day of the public defence the title of article I was: Designing Electronic Library Reference Documentation.

Free and Open Source Software has not only increased researchers’ interest about community-driven software development, but lately, interest from commercial actors increased as well. In addition, some scientists have claimed that Open Source Software has entered a new phase: OSS 2.0. Even so, a coherent way of analyzing commercial Open Source ventures is still missing. Commercial Open Source firms’ strategies are often described using the term “business models”. However, these models often lack stringent structures and have been used primarily to describe the firms’ offerings and methods to earn revenue. Through the adaptation of an existing, firmly theoretically-based analytical business model framework, this thesis suggests a new analysis model for studying for-profit Open Source companies. In addition, the framework is generically constructed, ensuring its usability for other industries as well. The model consists of three elements: market positions, operational platform and offering. This particular study concerned four software product vendors, all of which base their products on Open Source Software. When analyzing their business, insights were made about how these firms operated. The result show that there are certain key elements and factors that determine if a company has a sustainable business or not. From the analysis framework, three elements were refined. The main Open Source Software project connects the market positions and the operational platform; and from the offering, the product and service and the revenue model were very important. The study identified eight key factors which influenced the elements: brand for the product, the company and the Open Source Software project; community, that is the sum of the non-paying users and developers connected to Open Source Software projects; resources, which are community-based resources such as development and testing; legitimacy, the perceived legitimacy regarding licenses and the revenue models; control, i.e. the control the firm has of the software; ability to charge, or how the company can charge for its services; customers, the paying users; and finally volume, which is the number of paying customers. The findings also indicate that companies interested in working with the open-source community have to be able to balance the demands from both their customers and the community in order to benefit and gain competitive advantage. / Report code: LiU-TEK-LIC 2008:26.

<p>Evaluating software is a universal and complex problem. The question is: how should software be selected and adopted, or rather, which of the software packages is the most suitable for a specific environment? Extensive research on the evaluation of software has been done, but only a few researchers have considered evaluation of e-learning systems based on three software quality characteristics (i.e. usability, maintainability and deployability) for implementation in third world countries. In this thesis, it will be considered how to use a mixed research methods for the evaluation of free and open source e-learning systems in a developing country. The scope of this investigation is the evaluation of two free and open source e-learning systems at the Open University of Tanzania using 33 stakeholders (some with more and others with less computer expertise).</p>

Abstract: Title: Engelska (Svenska) Number of pages: 40 (47 including appendix) Author: Carl Strand Tutor: Göran Svensson Course: Media and Communication Studies C Period: Fall 2005 University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University Purpose/Aim: The purpose of this essay is to analyze how young people, in the ages 18 to 25, relate to the subject of file sharing, and what their attitudes to this phenomenon are. I aim to describe how they use file sharing, their knowledge about it, how their usage have changed due to the new copyright law, what their stands are on the question of resource control and management on the Internet, and what they think of the future of file sharing. Material/Method: The method being used is a qualitative focus group interview model, used to investigate how young people look at the subject of file sharing. The results of the interviews is then applied to a theoretical framework based on thoughts of Denis McQuail, Lawrence Lessig concerning creativity, copyright, resource management and file sharing on the Internet Main Results: My conclusion is that the widespread file sharing habits of young people is not only caused by the temptation of getting free stuff, but of the lack of commercial and legal alternatives. Youths are willing to pay for media if the distribution is superior to the illegal file sharing alternative. They are a generation of young people that has grown up in a society where the tendency in many fields has been to make everything faster and more effective. They want to be able to get everything, and they want it fast. They are what I call the Instant Generation. Keywords: File sharing, attitudes, focus groups, Darknet, Open Source, free resources, free creativity

The development of software was considered until the beginning of the 1990th as a cathedral like product development in closed companies. This way of development changed in the last decade. Open source software (OSS) development challenged this consideration significantly. OSS is produced in co-operation by skilled people, distributed and used by many moral agents. The result, the software itself, can be studied and modified. Herein is the main incentive for people to develop the software. In such a mode of production the freedom to access knowledge and information (=source code) is a necessity to produce the artifact (software). Software is a digital entity. The main difference in comparison to natural resources like oil, land, minerals is that it can be used and reproduced without losses. It lacks the capacity of getting naturally scarce. Contemporary intellectual property rights assume implicitly that goods might getting scarce one day. Imbedded in the term intellectual property is also an idea of "fencing" objects. In this thesis I will argue that anartificial"encing"of digital objects might cause unintentional bad consequences for the society. An other quality intellectual property rights are claimed to have is that they serve as an incentive for inventors/authors to produce new inventions and ideas. The practice of OSS development works without such an incentive provided by intellectual property rights. The moral conflict, which I attempt to unravel in this work deals with the question to what extend the application of intellectual property rights in software is necessary and how restrictive particular property rights in digital objects should be - if there should be any at all. Knowledge as the factor of production is of the same value in knowledge societies as land was for agrarian societies. The difference is in the mode of production and the un-limitless availability of digitalized knowledge. I argue that the"protection"of knowledge, and software is knowledge, has to be carefully revised in so called knowledge societies.

Att skriva enhetstester är en viktig del i nya populära systemutvecklingsmetoder som extreme programming. Med testdriven utveckling skriver man testerna innan den källkod som skall testas. Ett vanligt problem med dessa tester är att de blir beroende av delar i systemet som inte är intressant för själva testen. Mock objekt är en teknik som gör det enkelt att isolera tester från allt som inte är relaterat till det som skall testas. Det finns två sätt att se på mock objekt. Den traditionella synen är att mock objekt skall användas som ett verktyg vid isolering av externa system. Den alternativa synen är att mock objekt är ett designverktyg som kan driva fram en bättre design i systemet. I denna uppsats utvärderas ett antal mock objekt bibliotek ur detta nyare perspektiv. Resultatet visar att det finns åtskilliga skillnader mellan biblioteken.

Design har en otrolig förmåga att föra utvecklingen framåt men det finns många som är kritiska till hur design utvecklas i västvärldens samhälle. Syftet med denna uppsats är att analysera open design för att ge ett alternativt perspektiv på industridesign. Open design handlar om en designprocess där vem som helst kan delta, utveckla och tillverka produkter. Metoden har sin grund i open source-rörelsen som hastigt spreds i och med internets utbredning. Open design är dock inte lika välutvecklat då rådande marknads- och företagssystem till viss del hämmar detta. Dock finns det krafter som visar på att sättet vi idag ser på bland annat kreativitet och motivation är förlegat och behöver updaderas. Detta för att vi ska kunna möta de problem vi idag står inför beträffande miljö och rättvisa. Tanken med open design är att människor på lika villkor jorden över ska få samma chans att utveckla och använda ändamålsenliga produkter och idéer. Denna uppsats har en kritisk ställning till västvärldens sätt att behandla design och designprocessen. I det rådande systemet kommer design bara en del till nytta och överkonsumtion i väst har ofta en smutsig baksida i bland annat orättvisa handelsvillkor och arbetsförhållanden hos producenter. Uppsatsen är en litteraturstudie som beskriver och analyserar öppna ickekommersiella kollaborativa designprojekt.