Your participation in completing the Free and Open Source Software for Sustainable Development in Africa or FOSSDeva survey is highly welcome.

The survey can be accessed from http://servnet.ias.unu.edu/limesurvey/index.php?sid=86668&newtest=Y&lang=en

Please pass on the survey to friends, colleagues, researchers and research institutions interested in FOSS in Africa.

Looking forward to your participation.

Sincere regards

I co-edited (with Michael Wade) a special issue on Empirical Research on Free/Libre Open Source Software for JAIS, Journal of the Association for Information Systems. The special issue has appeared (2 issues, in fact, with a final paper to come in January). We were able to convince the publisher that they should make these issues open, so they are free to everyone. You can find them here: http://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol11/iss11/ and http://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol11/iss12/ .

I recently graduated with a master in Innovation Management from the Eindhoven University of Technology.

The subject of my master thesis is: How to buy something that is free?

It develops design principles, grounded in theory and practice, for the inclusion of (F/L)OSS in an organization's tactical procurement of software.

Organization's (especially government organization's) are very good at buying products. Creating an decent IT infrastructure proofs much more difficult. This thesis gives the reader design principles that can be used to change the way software is seen in the organization. They help an organization to strategically apply IT instead of just buying the next update.

Maurice Verheesen is currently preparing research on the inclusion of FLOSS in neutral tactical purchasing of software.

Much is known about the adoption of FLOSS. Literature states for instance reasons, trends and factors that influence the adoption. However when comparing procurement practices with the FLOSS phenomenon one can see several incompatibilities:

The 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems
3-6 June 2009, Skövde, Sweden

Conference web site: http://oss2009.org/
CFP: http://oss2009.org/index.php?id=cfp.htm (accepting submissions through 15 November, 2008)

We're excited to give you all a heads up that the entire FLOSSmole database is now available directly via a MySQL server.

We have transferred the database to the NSF TeraGrid Data Central hosting site [1] (based at the San Diego Supercomputing centre). It's a bigger machine and professionally administered, which was much better than we could offer ourselves. See below for access procedure.

The FLOSShub site is currently in development. We are developing a portal for the free/libre and open source software development and research community to provide easier access to a wide variety of resources for FLOSS research. Check back soon for new content and features!