Open Source Software (OSS) has become a strategic asset for a number of reasons, such as short time-to-market software delivery, reduced development and maintenance costs, and its customization capabilities. Therefore, organizations are increasingly becoming OSS adopters, either as a result of a strategic decision or because it is almost unavoidable nowadays, given the fact that most commercial software also relies at some extent in OSS infrastructure. The way in which organizations adopt OSS affects and shapes their businesses. Therefore, knowing the impact of different OSS adoption strategies in the context of an organization may help improving the processes undertaken inside this organization and ultimately pave the road to strategic moves. In this paper, we propose to model OSS adoption strategies using a goal-oriented notation, in which different actors state their objectives and dependencies on each other. These models describe the consequences of adopting one such strategy or another: which are the strategic and operational goals that are supported, which are the resources that emerge, etc. The models rely on an OSS ontology, built upon a systematic literature review, which comprises the activities and resources that characterise these strategies. Different OSS adoption strategy models arrange these ontology elements in diverse ways. In order to assess which is the OSS adoption strategy that better fits the organization needs, the notion of model coverage is introduced, which allows to measure the degree of concordance among every strategy with the model of the organization by comparing the respective models. The approach is illustrated with an example of application in a big telecommunications company.
Research on the psychosocial effects of Internet and social network usage in seniors is either contradictory or sparse. As part of the Third Age Online project, this paper reports a cross-sectional survey conducted in Germany, the Netherlands and in Switzerland. The survey, utilizing regression analysis, examined whether or not social inclusion and mental wellbeing were predictors of Internet usage and social network usage. Results showed that social inclusion variables were associated with both Internet usage and social network usage. Internet usage was associated with respondents who were both less and more socially included. Mental wellbeing was positively related to Internet usage but not to social network usage. In further studies, longitudinal designs are needed to reveal the directions of causality between Internet/social network usage and mental wellbeing/social inclusion.
Cloud computing is a new service delivery paradigm that aims to provide standardized services with self-service, pay-per-use, and seemingly unlimited scalability. This paradigm can be implemented on multiple service levels (infrastructures, run-time platform, or actual Software as a Service). They are are expected to be an important component in the future Internet. This article introduces upcoming security challenges for cloud services such as multi-tenancy, transparency and establishing trust into correct operation, and security interoperability. For each of these challenges, we introduce existing concepts to mitigate these risks and survey related research in these areas.
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