The widespread adoption of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in many strategic contexts of the information technology society has drawn the attention on the issues regarding how to handle the complexity of assembling and managing a huge number of (packaged) components in a consistent and effective way. FOSS distributions (and in particular GNU/Linux-based ones) have always provided tools for managing the tasks of installing, removing and upgrading the (packaged) components they were made of. While these tools provide a (not always effective) way to handle these tasks on the client side, there is still a lack of tools that could help the distribution editors to maintain, on the server side, large and high-quality distributions. In this paper we present our research whose main goal is to fill this gap: we show our approach, the tools we have developed and their application with experimental results. Our contribution provides an effective and automatic way to support distribution editors in handling those issues that were, until now, mostly addressed using ad-hoc tools and manual techniques.
In this paper we present an approach for developing adaptable software applications. The problem we are facing is that of a (possibly mobile) user who wants to download and execute an application from a remote server. The user's hosting device can be of different kinds (laptops, personal digital assistants, cellular phones, communicators, etc.) with specific hardware and software capabilities. The problem is to be able to decide whether the user's current device characteristics are compatible with the application requirements in order to prevent execution failures. In the negative case we want to identify the reasons that determined the incompatibility and perform an automatic adaptation of the application, so that it can match the user's device capabilities. We adopt a declarative approach: we provide each device with a declarative description of its characteristics and, possibly, context constraints. Inspired by Proof Carrying Code (PCC), we use first-order logic formulae to model both the behavior of the code, with respect to the properties of interest, and the execution context. The adaptation process is carried out by using theorem proving techniques, in particular, the proof assistant HOL4. The aim is to derive a formal proof which asserts that the behavior of the code can be correctly adapted to the given context. By construction, the proof, if it exists, gives information on how the adaptation has to be done. On the application side, Java2 Micro Edition (J2ME) is the chosen reference application development environment.
Abstract. Managing risks related to OSS adoption is a must for organizations that need to smoothly integrate OSS-related practices in their development processes. Adequate tool support may pave the road to effective risk management and ensure the sustainability of such activity. In this paper, we present the RISCOSS platform for managing risks in OSS adoption. RISCOSS builds upon a highly configurable data model that allows customization to several types of scopes. It implements two different working modes: exploration, where the impact of decisions may be assessed before making them; and continuous assessment, where risk variables (and their possible consequences on business goals) are continuously monitored and reported to decision-makers. The blackboard-oriented architecture of the platform defines several interfaces for the identified techniques, allowing new techniques to be plugged in.
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