User:Bhim
--An Impact Assessment of Open Source Software Certification in Warranty Domain--
While researching during first assignment (Wiki editing) I noted that there is a huge interest in open source, also there are various big communities for this (e.g. http://www.opensource.org/). Further, I noted that some of the organizations like Red Had have already introduced certification in their open source server technologies. Red Hat Linux grew up as an open source server technology till its 8th version, later they decided to release an enterprise version supported by a basic community version. Its desktop version is known as Fedora Core, currently in its tenth version. The certification information can be found in the Red Hat site (http://www.redhat.com/certification/).
Today, there are numerous open source technologies that a product company can choose from. There are both advantages and disadvantages of open source uses. So far as product companies are concerned, usually they have an architect-team that contains the core technical skills which are not only required to design and to development software systems but also to maintain and to extend such systems. This team spends enormous amount of time to make choices on technologies, it becomes even harder while carrying out this process for open source as there is not much support available in terms of services. It becomes largely a research activity if we discover a bug and wanted to fix that bug before we adapt a particular open source technology.
Current trend for open source certification is largely distributed i. e. each product releasing company (like Red Hat) have their own standards for certification. These standards vary widely across such companies. Moreover, it becomes a strategy to attract open source community to enterprise solution- streams. This research also aims to separate the standards between community versions (truly open source) and enterprise versions, as a result, open source technology does not have to rely on enterprise versions.
An ideal situation in open source would be to have a global standard, also a global standard in certification. As with everything else this industry is also influenced by market policies. Sometimes the influence is so high that we loose the feeling of openness. Openness entirely becomes a way to reach to a closeness. A direction toward the ideal global standard would be to do case studies for various product-companies that are using open source technologies in their specific products. Once this impact analysis is done for substantially large number of products around the world, we can find commonalities (a particularists approach of finding knowledge, Dr. Pritchard – What is this thing called knowledge) and then aggregate that to form a global standard for open source. This can be applied for open source certification as well.
An enforcement of such global standards is hard to achieve but since software technologies have a lot of flexibility, in my opinion, enforcement should be inherent in the product itself. There should be quality related assertions (CAR Hoare – Unifying Theories of Programming, Oxford University Computing Laboratory) that would fail if a product does not meet specified standards and hence denial of such products during composite product-composition. This would technically stop low quality open-source products from being in the service of community. Now the question is who enforces such assertions? Ultimately, it should be mandated by a governing body.
This research aims to contribute in the direction of ideal open source standards by carrying out an impact assessment of open source certification in a global warranty-product (software) development company (http://www.4cs.com, we have around 18 very large vehicle manufacturing companies including some of the world's largest, like John Deere headquartered in quad cities, IL/IA; DTNA/Freightliner headquartered in Portland, OR). The result of this research reveals a feasibility of such ideal open standards in practice. It will also suggest a constructive direction to take without adding significant cost on the part of such companies. The whole thing will allow open software tools being developed and distributed over Internet without a compromise in quality and service.
In third assignment, I plan to do a mind-map picture that will become a part of final paper. I will email outline of the paper for professors' review.