How commercial involvement affects open source projects: three case studies on issue reporting

Whereas most research on Internetware has focused on new technologies for keeping track of a changing Internet,little attention has been paid to the software development process.A large portion of the software running the Internet is open source software.Open source software is developed both by volunteers and commercial companies,often jointly.Companies get involved in open source projects for commercial reasons,and bring with them a commercial software development process.Thus,it is important to understand how commercial involvement affects the software development process of open source projects.This article presents case studies of three open source application servers that are being developed jointly by a volunteer community and one primary software company.We are interested in better understanding developer behavior,specifically task distribution and performance,based on whether the developer is an external contributor,e.g.,a volunteer working in their spare time,or a commercial developer from inside the primary backing company who is being paid for their time.To achieve this,we look at issue reporting as an example of commercial involvement in open source projects.In particular,we investigate the distribution of tasks among volunteers and commercial developers by studying the source of reported issues and quantify the task performance on user experience via the issue resolution speed.We construct measures based on historical records in issue tracking repositories.Our results show that,with intensified commercial involvement,the majority of issue reporting tasks would be undertaken by commercial developers,and issue resolution time would be reduced,implying a better user experience.We hope our methods and results provide practical insights for designing an efficient hybrid development process in the Internetware environment.     

The Economic Case for Open Source Foundations

By establishing a successful open source platform, software firms can compete more effectively across technology stacks and thereby increase their addressable market.     

Mechanical Gradient Cues for Guided Cell Motility and Control of Cell Behavior on Uniform Substrates

A novel method for the fabrication and the use of simple uniform poly(dimethylsiloxane) PDMS substrates for controlling cell motility by a mechanical gradient is reported. The substrate is fabricated in PDMS using soft lithography and consists of a soft membrane suspended on top of a patterned PDMS substrate. The difference in the gradient stiffness is related to the underlying pattern. It is shown experimentally that these uniform substrates can modulate the response of cell motility, thus enabling patterning on the surfaces with precise cell motility. Because of the uniformity of the substrate, cells can spread equally and a directional movement to stiffer regions is clearly observed. Varying the geometry underlying the membrane, cell patterning and movement can be quantitatively characterized. This procedure is capable of controlling cell motility with high fidelity over large substrate areas. The most significant advance embodied in this method is that it offers the use of mechanical features to control cell adhesion and not topographical or chemical variations, which has not been reported so far. This modulation of the response of cell motility will be useful for the design and fabrication of advanced planar and 3D biological assemblies suitable for applications in the field of biotechnology and for tissue‐engineering purposes.     

Effects of preliminary perceptual output on neuronal activity of the primary motor cortex.

Observations of single neurons in the primary motor cortex of 1 monkey provided evidence that preliminary perceptual information reaches the motor system before perceptual analysis is complete. Neurons were recorded during a task in which 1 stimulus was assigned to a wrist flexion response and another was assigned to wrist extension. Two stimuli were assigned to a no-go response; each was visually similar to either the flexion or the extension stimulus. When a no-go stimulus was presented, neurons responded with weaker versions of the discharge patterns exhibited to the visually similar stimulus requiring a movement, suggesting that neurons receive partial perceptual information favoring that movement. Functionally separate neuronal populations were identified, and differences in the activations of these provide evidence about the functional effects of preliminary perceptual output on movement control processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Critical parameters for the scale-up synthesis of quantum dots

The optical properties of quantum dots strongly depend on the synthesis conditions including the reagent grade of the chemicals. We developed a synthesis set-up allowing the reproducible preparation of quantum dots with a high control over chemical and physical parameters. Here, we report on the effects of the injection speed, the stirring velocity and the reagent grade of the chemicals on the photoluminescence behaviour of CdSe quantum dots. Additionally we compared the commonly used hot-injection method with a novel one-pot approach leading to a slightly larger particle size distribution of the resulting high quality quantum dots in the latter case.