Having a successful innovation process is crucial for any competitive enterprise. Being able to rapidly prototype and validate new concepts can reducethe time and cost from the specification-phase to a final product. This thesisinvestigates how open source hardware and software can accelerate the ideavalidation of proprietary systems.The development of a microcontroller shield and open-source-based softwareis described and how this artifact can take advantage of the open source community, thus making innovation more flexible and concept validation quicker.This thesis followed a five-stage development process, and is evaluated withtwo controlled experiments.The resulting artifact was shown through these controlled experiments thatit was able to improve the idea validation of proprietary systems. The resultof the controlled experiments showed that a new concept could be validatedfaster.

This dissertation consists of the first three papers in a stream of organization theory research inspired by the insight that humans are as motivated by identity self interest - or the "longing to belong" - as by instrumental self interest. The first paper (chapter 2) spells out this insight and its implications for the governance of knowledge intensive organizations; the second paper (chapter 3) offers an empirical test of the fundamental assumption that a continuum of motivation influences governance arrangements; and the third paper (chapter 4) uses a historical case study to refine process theories of organization by emphasizing the struggle for dominance between identity groups and their logics. / Business Administration/Strategic Management

The first part of the work is focused on the history and last trend on library automation and integrated library systems, with specific attention on the italian context. The second part evaluates some possible use of open source software in library and open source diffusion in Italy.The third part analyze Koha, an open source ILS, and its possible application at the University of Ca' Foscari Library System.

Software firms can use open source development model combined with proprietary development model to increase their profitability. Open source development models can help software firms create products with better technical features at a lower price. Since open source development is a community based development method the popularity of the software among customers will also increase. Using open source development method with proprietary method will also require firms to sell the product at a lower price. This creates a challenge for the firms to find the optimal price and level of openness to maximize their profit. Using the systems dynamics methodology, development, employment and customer choice for a typical software firm was captured in a simulation model to understand the dynamics of the software firm in a competitive market and to find the optimal level of openness and price. The model was built based on previous research literature, various software models and from the author's understanding of the software industry. Our analysis suggests that in a fast evolving market where customers spend less time researching and shopping for a software product (Antivirus market VS Operating Systems market), companies should maintain lower level of openness and higher proprietary type development to increase the Net Present Value of the organization. The software firm could benefit from a higher level of openness in a market where the customers base their purchasing decision on the popularity and compatibility of the software and strong network effects are present (e.g. Business intelligence software). / Master of Science

We report on the state of the field of algorithm visualization, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Computer science educators seem to find algorithm and data structure visualizations attractive for their classrooms. Educational research shows that some are effective while many are not. Clearly, then, visualizations are difficult to create and use right. There is little in the way of a supporting community, and many visualizations are downright poor. Topic distribution is heavily skewed towards simple concepts with advanced topics receiving little to no attention. We have cataloged nearly 400 visualizations available on the Internet. We have a wiki-based catalog which includes availability, platform, strengths and weaknesses, responsible personnel and institutions, and other data about each visualization. We have developed extraction and analysis tools to gather statistics about the corpus of visualizations. Based on analysis of this collection, we point out areas where improvements may be realized and suggest techniques for implementing such improvements. We pay particular attention to the free and open source software movement as a model which the visualization community may do well to emulate, from both a software engineering perspective and a community-building standpoint. / Master of Science

Commercial buildings consume more than 40% of the total energy consumption in the United States. Almost 90% of these buildings are small- and medium-sized buildings that do not have a Building Energy Management (BEM) system. The reasons behind this are – lack of awareness, unavailability of inexpensive packaged solutions, and disincentive to invest in a BEM system if the tenant is not the owner. Several open source tools and technologies have emerged recently that can be used for building automation and energy management. However, none of these systems is turnkey and deployment ready. They also lack consistent and intuitive navigation, security, and performance required for a BEM system. The overall project - of which this thesis research is a part - addresses the design and implementation of an open source secure web based user platform to monitor, schedule, control, and perform functions needed for a BEM system serving small and medium-size buildings. The focus of this work are: principles of intuitive graphical user interface design, abstracting device functions into a comprehensive data model, identifying threats and vulnerabilities, and implementing a security framework for the web platform. Monitor and control solutions for devices such as load controllers and sensors are abstracted and their decentralized control strategies are proposed and implemented using an open source robust scalable user platform accessible locally and remotely. The user platform is open-source, scalable, provides role-based access, dynamic, and modular in design. The comprehensive data model includes a user management model, device model, session model, and a scheduling model. The data model is designed to be flexible, robust and can be extended for any new device type. Security risks are analyzed using a threat model to identify security goals. The proposed security framework includes user authentication, device approval, role-based access, secure information exchange protocols, and web platform security. Performance of the user interface platform is evaluated for responsiveness in different screen sizes, page response times, throughput, and the performance of client side entities. / Master of Science

Publishing software publicly is a new phenomenon for U.S. federal government agencies. In August 2016, the White House issued the Federal Source Code Policy: Achieving Efficiency, Transparency, and Innovation through Reusable and Open Source Software (FSCP). The FSCP mandated Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act agencies to publish at least 20% of their custom developed code as open source software (OSS). The federal government has the responsibility to account for public spending, including spending for IT. The publication of OSS is one way the public can know about government spending. OSS additionally benefits the public by providing access to code, thus, making it the "People's Code." From 2016 to 2019, the progress of CFO Act agencies in implementing the policy was mixed. This study examines whether and how organizational theoretical variables – cultural beliefs, public engagement, structural dimensions, and organizational location – affect policy implementation. The study uses the publication of OSS as an indicator of effective policy implementation, and it identifies the factors that hinder or aid publishing OSS. Using metadata collected from GitHub's application programming interface (API), I created a sampling frame that included 23 of 24 executive agencies publishing OSS before and after the FSCP was published. From the sampling frame, 25 participants from 20 agencies agreed to participate in the study. These participants were from software development units that minimally, moderately, or frequently published OSS. The sample consisted of participants from units mostly located outside a Chief Information Officer (CIO) office focused on software development and data science activities. Grounded theory provided an approach for data collection with elite interviews and artifact gathering allowing for analysis in an iterative, comparative manner for generating a theory of policy implementation for OSS publication. Units more frequently published OSS when they expressed non-monolithic and advantageous cultural beliefs; practiced more and more varied public engagement through bi-directional communication, events, and electronic tools; had structures with less centralization, more formalization, more differentiation, and more coordination; and were located in the "middle" of organizations with fewer hierarchical layers. Additionally, some units expressed both cautionary and advantageous cultural beliefs suggesting beliefs alone are not enough to allow units to publish OSS. This study contributes to policy, public administration, and organization theory literatures. It enhances scholarship by examining a new phenomenon and aids practitioners by providing implications for consideration when implementing policy. / Doctor of Philosophy / Publishing software and its associated source code for public use is a new phenomenon for U.S. federal government agencies. In August 2016, the White House issued the Federal Source Code Policy: Achieving Efficiency, Transparency, and Innovation through Reusable and Open Source Software (FSCP). The FSCP mandated executive-level agencies to publish at least 20% of their custom developed code as open source software (OSS). OSS is software that can be shared within a community of developers through accompanying licenses hosted in online code sharing platforms. The federal government has the responsibility to account for public spending, including spending for IT. The publication of OSS is one way the public can know about government spending. OSS additionally benefits the public by providing access to code, thus, making it the "People's Code." From 2016 to 2019, the progress of executive branch agencies in implementing the FSCP was mixed. This study examines whether and how organizational factors – cultural beliefs, public engagement, structural dimensions, and organizational location – affect agency policy implementation. The study uses the publication of OSS as an indicator of effective policy implementation, and it identifies the factors that hinder or aid publishing OSS. To arrive at a general understanding of agency efforts at policy implementation, I collected data from GitHub's application programming interface (API) and created a list of 23 of 24 executive-level agencies that published OSS both before and after the FSCP was issued. From these agencies, 25 participants from 20 agencies agreed to participate in the study. These participants were from software development units that minimally, moderately, or frequently published OSS. The sample consisted of participants from units mostly located outside a Chief Information Officer (CIO) office that focused on software development and data science activities. Grounded theory provided an approach for data collection with interviews and document collection, leading to continuous analysis for generating a theory of policy implementation for OSS publication. Units more frequently published OSS when they expressed views complementary to those of their parent organization and held advantageous cultural beliefs; practiced more and more varied public engagement through two-way communication, events, and electronic tools; had structures with less centralization, more formalization, more differentiation, and more coordination; and were located in the "middle" of an organization with fewer hierarchical layers. Additionally, some units expressed both cautionary and advantageous cultural beliefs suggesting beliefs alone are not enough to allow units to publish OSS. This study contributes to policy, public administration, and organization theory literatures. It enhances scholarship by examining a new phenomenon and aids practitioners by providing implications for consideration when implementing policy.

The Global System for Mobile (GSM) cellular standard, having been in existence for over two decades, is the most widely deployed wireless technology in the world. While third generation networks and beyond, such as Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) and Long Term Evolution (LTE), are undergoing extraordinary growth and driving a large share of current cellular development, technologies and deployments based on GSM are still dominant on a global scale and, like more recent standards, continue to evolve very rapidly. The software-defined radio (SDR) base station is one technology that is driving rapid change in cellular infrastructure. While commercial vendors have now embraced SDR, there is another movement that has recently gained prominence. That movement is the convergence of open source software and hardware with cellular implementation. OpenBTS, a deployable implementation of the GSM radio air interface, and the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), a RF hardware platform, are two primary examples of such open source software and hardware products. OpenBTS and the USRP underlie three GSM features that are implemented and presented in this thesis. This thesis describes the extension of the OpenBTS software-defined radio transceiver in the three critical areas of user capacity, transmit signal integrity, and the embedded small form factor. First, an optimized wideband multicarrier implementation is presented that substantially increases the capacity beyond that of a single carrier system. Second, the GSM modulator is examined in depth and extended to provide performance that exceeds standards compliance by a significant margin. Third, operation of the GSM transceiver on an E100 embedded platform with ARM and fixed point DSP processors will be explored, optimized, and tested. / Master of Science

Studien ”Inga bevis inget brott? Utmaningar med öppna källor och digital bevisning iutredningen av internetrelaterade sexualbrott” ägnar sig åt att utforska hur vanligtförekommande sexualbrott på internet är, särskilt de som drabbar barn och unga. Dengranskar även hur effektivt myndigheter använder Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) för attutreda dessa brott. Genom en blandning av kvantitativa och kvalitativa forskningsmetoder,inklusive enkäter och intervjuer med myndighetspersoner, syftar studien till att belysaOSINT:s roll i att identifiera förövare och förebygga sexualbrott online.Resultaten från studien visar att OSINT är ett effektivt verktyg för att spåra förövare ochkartlägga sexualbrott, men det uppkommer även betydande utmaningar relaterade tillintegritetsrisker och juridiska komplexiteter. Det framkommer tydligt att det finns svårighetermed att samla in tillräckliga bevis vid utredningar av sexualbrott på internet, samt att dessabrott är alltför vanliga. Dessutom visar studiens enkätundersökning att 149 personer harutsatts för sexualbrott och endast tre av dessa har anmält brottet. Uppsatsen understrykervikten av fortsatt forskning och behovet av utbildningsprogram för myndigheter och andraberörda parter för att effektivisera kampen mot denna typ av brottslighet.Diskussionen inkluderar även de etiska och juridiska frågeställningarna kring OSINT, vilketunderstryker behovet av tydligare riktlinjer för att skydda individens integritet underutredningsprocessen

Context: In both commercial and open-source software development, newcomers often join the development process in the advanced stages of the software development lifecycle. Newcomers frequently face barriers impeding their ability to make early contributions, often caused by a lack of understanding. For this purpose, we have developed an LLM-based tool called SPAC-B that facilitates project-specific question-answering to aid newcomers' understanding of software projects. Objective: Investigate the LLM-based tool's ability to assist newcomers in understanding software projects by measuring its accuracy and conducting an experiment. Method: In this study, a case study is conducted to investigate the accuracy of the tool, measured in relevance, completeness, and correctness. Furthermore, an experiment is performed among software developers to test the tool's ability to help newcomers formulate better plans for open-source issues. Results: SPAC-B achieved an accuracy of 4.60 in relevance, 4.30 in completeness, and 4.28 in correctness on a scale from 1 to 5. It improved the combined mean score of the plans of the 10 participants in our experiments from 1.90 to 2.70, and 8 out of 10 participants found the tool helpful. Conclusions: SPAC-B has demonstrated high accuracy and helpfulness, but further research is needed to confirm if these results can be generalized to a larger population and other contexts of use.