The role of open source software in program analysis for reverse engineering

Author(s):  
Taher Ahmed Ghaleb
2009 ◽  
pp. 1934-1950
Author(s):  
Kirk St. Amant

This chapter examines the role of open source software (OSS) in international outsourcing practices that involve the transfer of knowledge work from one nation to another. Included in this examination are discussions of the benefits and the limitations of OSS use in outsourcing. The chapter also presents organization-specific and industry-wide strategies for effective OSS use in outsourcing situations. The chapter then concludes with a discussion of areas of international outsourcing where OSS might have important future applications or effects. The purpose of such an examination is to provide readers with the knowledge and the insights needed to make effective decisions related to the use of OSS in international outsourcing situations.


Author(s):  
Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers

This chapter discusses the role of the project/product community in the open source product life cycle. It outlines how a community-driven approach affects not only the development process, but also (and more importantly) the marketing/sales process, the deployment, the operation, and in general the resulting software product. Participation in the community is essential for any organization using the product, leading to the concept of a community customer. Specific community participation guidelines are given to organizations and individuals who deploy and use open source software, further develop it, or offer lifetime services on the product.


Author(s):  
Bruno de Vuyst

This chapter discusses legal and economic rationale in regards to open source software protection. Software programs are, under TRIPS1, protected by copyright (reference is made to the Berne Convention2). The issue with this protection is that, due to the dichotomy idea/expression that is typical for copyright protection, reverse engineering of software is not excluded, and copyright is hence found to be an insufficient protection. Hence, in the U.S., software makers have increasingly turned to patent protection. In Europe, there is an exclusion of computer programs in Article 52 (2) c) EPC (EPO, 1973), but this exclusion is increasingly narrowed and some call for abandoning the exclusion altogether. A proposal by the European Commission, made in 2002, called for a directive to allow national patent authorities to patent software in a broader way, so as to ensure further against reverse engineering; this proposal, however, was shelved in 2005 over active opposition within and outside the European parliament. In summary, open source software does not fit in any proprietary model; rather, it creates a freedom to operate. Ultimately, there is a need to rethink approaches to property law so as to allow for viable software packaging in both models.


Author(s):  
Laura Fortunato ◽  
Mark Galassi

Free and open source software (FOSS) is any computer program released under a licence that grants users rights to run the program for any purpose, to study it, to modify it, and to redistribute it in original or modified form. Our aim is to explore the intersection between FOSS and computational reproducibility. We begin by situating FOSS in relation to other ‘open’ initiatives, and specifically open science, open research, and open scholarship. In this context, we argue that anyone who actively contributes to the research process today is a computational researcher, in that they use computers to manage and store information. We then provide a primer to FOSS suitable for anyone concerned with research quality and sustainability—including researchers in any field, as well as support staff, administrators, publishers, funders, and so on. Next, we illustrate how the notions introduced in the primer apply to resources for scientific computing, with reference to the GNU Scientific Library as a case study. We conclude by discussing why the common interpretation of ‘open source’ as ‘open code’ is misplaced, and we use this example to articulate the role of FOSS in research and scholarship today. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reliability and reproducibility in computational science: implementing verification, validation and uncertainty quantification in silico ’.


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