I've added a few more resources to OSStrategy.com but most importantly I've publised up a short report on Sourceforge projects.
Go check it out and if you can help with the research please feel free to register on the page itself
started to setup OSstrategy.com. It will be the new place for my phd stuff and other discussion.
ok, a long time between diaries. On my sourceforge site I've uploaded my draft confirmation of candidature document. It's getting there but the real meat of the argument rests with a couple of short sections in the document.
So get over there and please comment.
So tomorrow I'm presenting the document for my confirmation. All should go well.
The presentation went well. People with no previous exposure to the concept of open source and free software seemed to understand what the hell I was saying. That's a good thing (tm).
The difficult part as expected is the challenges the Open source/Free software standard lays down for a resource based view. There are lots of measurement issues and conceptual issues. For example the traditional financial measures dont' apply and the notion of sustainable comptetive advantage doesn't exactly fit. This was a stumbling block for a few people.
However I think the issues are more to do with the traditional application of strategic management to firms. The default setting is to use financial measures of performance. I have to now make an integrated and robust set of non-financial measures of OSSD project 'performance'.
On the sustainable competitive advantage front I need to present the argument by going back into the fundamentals of the assumptions of a resource based view. This means the inclusion of arguments that address maximising behaviour, gift relationships, welfare economics and transaction-cost economics.
There are still many issues and problems dangling around. I still need to work on getting a sample but before that knowing if I can get a decent sample. Measurement issues will be a big concern with trying to test a set of hypotheses.
For now I need to write up a comprehensive literature review of the resource-based view with a focus on OSSD.
Tomorrow, I'm presenting my Phd Outline to the school and other phd students so I'm busily searching new updated info on OSSD and resource based theory.
On the palm pilot front I'm using sitescooper which automatically retreives webpages and trims html. This is a great utility written in perl and I have all the sites of interest scanned every morning at 5am. Then I use warmsynch to synch the webpage up to my palm pilot at 5:30am. Fantastic for keeping up with the latest news.
For those that are interested i added a couple more links to an earlier diary showing advogato articles of interest to my phd research
I'm interested in finding out if anyone else is actively researching open source software development. When i mean research I mean of the academic kind. But any sort of rigorous research is included. I noticed that redhat has put up some grants for doing research on Open Source at the Red Hat Center.
So far I haven't found much content apart from informed expert commentary (from journalists and programmers and the like) published through books, web pages or discussion lists. The amount of quality content is growing rapidly but 'research' pieces are hard to find. Would anyone find it useful to have a site that tracks the research that people are doing regardless of field of interest? I would personally find it handy. Put that on my TODO list.
I'm becoming dismayed that two of my submissions to slashot ('ask slashdot) type questions have been rejected. I find this curious.. am I trying to the post to the wrong forum. Based on other 'ask slashdot' posts i thought my OSSD posts would live happily there. How well.. advogato might be the place.
I've added some more references to the reference list section on my project site on sourceforge. Look under the documents section.
Got a Palm Vx. Now the task of organising my life and phd begins.. and maybe I will install some games. Just to test it out of course.
I've gone through the advogato archives and picked out the following as relevant discussion.
add these as well
MMM and
OSS
Extreme
Programming and Open Source Software
Free
Source Project Management
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
