Bjorn Lundell – författare

We are very pleased to introduce Open Source Development, Communities and Quality. The International Conference on Open Source Systems has come to its fourth edition – OSS 2008. Now, Free, Libre, and Open Source software is by all means now one of the most relevant subjects of study in several disciplines, ranging from information technology to social sciences and including also law, business, and political sciences. There are several conference tracks devoted to open source software with several publications appearing in high quality journals and magazines. OSS 2008 has been organized with the purpose of being the reference venue for those working in this area, being the most prominent conference in this area. For this th reason OSS 2008 has been located within the frameworks of the 20 World Computer Congress, WCC 2008, in Milan, the largest event of IFIP in 2008. We believe that this conference series, and the IFIP working group it represents, can play an important role in meeting these challenges, and hope that this book will become a valuable contribution to the open source body of research.

"Don''t wait for someone to write a book you want to read, write it yourselfl" This was the message we received when we asked around for a book that described final year projects for computer science and information systems. In this book, we have gathered our experiences of conducting and supervising final year projects in computer science and information systems. In this book, we present a process for conducting final year projects. This process was developed at the University of Skovde, Sweden. It has been applied successfully to a wide spectrum of projects, with many different subject areas and styles of project. Typical subject areas have included, for example, artificial intelligence, theoretical computer science, databases, data communication, distributed systems, human-computer interaction, operating systems, real-time systems, software engineering, systems analysis and technology transfer. The styles of projects have been both theoretical and more empirically oriented, and have included both science and technology oriented projects. It is our hope that this book will be a valuable companion to the three actors involved in a final year project: student, supervisor and examiner. In addition to the general descriptions and advice provided in this book, we want to emphasise that it is important for students to find out the exact requirements at the department where the project is undertaken. May 2002 Mikael Berndtsson Jorgen Hansson Bjorn Olsson Bjorn Lundell Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the support ofa number of people.

Any B. Sc. or M. Sc. study programme in the computing discipline typically ends with a capstone project. A capstone project builds and tests the skills and the knowledge acquired during the education and is an essential part of the training towards becoming a professional. There is a large number of different terms for these types of projects: capstone project, senior project, final year project, B. Sc. / M. Sc. thesis project, etc. In this book we will use the term ‘thesis project’, and in some cases, for the sake of simplicity, just ‘project’. This book focuses on thesis projects within the computing discipline. Thus, the type of project discussed in this book is in line with the capstone format described in the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 2001 Computer Science (p. 53): … an alternative capstone format is a research experience that includes some original work, a review of the scientific literature, and an investigation of a proposed solution, f- lowed by a scientific paper and/or an oral presentation of the results. It is important to remember that these are undergraduates and be realistic about the amount and quality of research expected. Even so, it may be more worthwhile to expose outstanding students to the challenges of research than to have them design and build yet another program In this book, we present a process for conducting thesis projects with the resear- orientation described in the quote above.

Welcome to the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems! It is quite an achievement to reach the five-year mark – that’s the sign of a successful enterprise. This annual conference is now being recognized as the primary event for the open source research community, attracting not only high-quality papers, but also building a community around a technical program, a collection of workshops, and (starting this year) a Doctoral Consortium. Reaching this milestone reflects the efforts of many people, including the conference founders, as well as the organizers and participants in the previous conferences. My task has been easy, and has been greatly aided by the hard work of Kevin Crowston and Cornelia Boldyreff, the Program Committee, as well as the Organizing Team led by Björn Lundell. All of us are also grateful to our attendees, especially in the difficult economic climate of 2009. We hope the participants found the conference valuable both for its technical content and for its personal networking opportunities. To me, it is interesting to look back over the past five years, not just at this conference, but at the development and acceptance of open source software. Since 2004, the business and commercial side of open source has grown enormously. At that time, there were only a handful of open source businesses, led by RedHat and its Linux distribution. Companies such as MySQL and JBoss were still quite small.