Partners from the COSI project were represented in a special focus session on Open Source, organised as part of the ITEA 2 Symposium 2008, in Rotterdam. The session was organised as an "Open Source Software Workshop", involving leading representatives from several European ICT clusters, ITEA projects and European companies working with Open Source. The panellists represented a mixture of: different kinds of clusters, large and small companies, and previous and ongoing ITEA projects. The session was moderated by the technical manager of COSI, Dr. Björn Lundell, University of Skövde, who also gave an introduction and overview of the current situation for Open Source in Europe. Two additional COSI partners (Philips Healthcare and Telvent) were represented amongst the six panellists, namely the project leader for COSI, Frank van der Linden, and Jesus Bermejo, who also represented the Spanish ICT cluster constellation, Prometeo, IRISLibre and Cenatic. At the start of the session, participants were provided with an overview of the main achievements and issues from eight (finished and ongoing) ITEA projects, all addressing various aspects of Open Source. The session was well attended and the audience and panelists engaged very actively in the discussion.

The picture shows the panellists during the session:

COSI Finland held its final workshop in JTO, Kirkkonummi, Finland 4-5.9. The project results were presented, evaluated and discussed. We had two distinguished guests Professor Kevin Crowston from Syracuse
University and Netta Iivari from University of Oulu.

We have linked the presentations below.

FLOSS: What we know and what we don't know: Kevin Crowston, Syracuse University
http://www.itea-cosi.org/modules/docmanager/get_file.php?curent_file=33&curent_dir=2


Usability in Open Source: Netta Iivari, University of Oulu.
http://www.itea-cosi.org/modules/docmanager/get_file.php?curent_file=28&curent_dir=2


Overview of COSI results: Pentti Marttiin, NSN
http://www.itea-cosi.org/modules/docmanager/get_file.php?curent_file=32&curent_dir=2


Industrial Experiences of COSI (NSN tool selection): Juha-Pekka Nurro, NSN
http://www.itea-cosi.org/modules/docmanager/get_file.php?curent_file=25&curent_dir=2


Industrial Experiences of COSI (NSN iSource): Pentti Marttiin, NSN
http://www.itea-cosi.org/modules/docmanager/get_file.php?curent_file=29&curent_dir=2

Industrial Experiences of COSI (Meritie): Rauno Saarnio Meritie
http://www.itea-cosi.org/modules/docmanager/get_file.php?curent_file=30&curent_dir=2


Academic results of COSI: Katja Henttonen, VTT
http://www.itea-cosi.org/modules/docmanager/get_file.php?curent_file=27&curent_dir=2


Academic results of COSI: Juho Lindman, HSE
http://www.itea-cosi.org/modules/docmanager/get_file.php?curent_file=26&curent_dir=2

COSI was represented at the 20th World Computer Congress (WCC 2008) which was organised by IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) in Milan, Italy, 7-10 September, 2008. Amongst the conferences co-located and organised during this congress, several COSI partners were represented at the Fourth International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2008). Several contributions from COSI were presented during OSS 2008, including a number of research papers and a panel on opportunities and risks for Open Source Software in industry . The technical manager in COSI also contributed to the organisation of the event, with specific responsibility for the scientific program on “Open Source adoption and quality” and the production of the proceedings from the conference .

During OSS 2008, COSI was also represented in a panel organised by the NESSI Open Source working group . One of the issues discussed in this panel concerned education on Open Source that is relevant to industry. As part of this panel discussion, the technical manager of COSI presented an overview of a 3-year (B.Sc.) study programme, “Open Source – Systems Developer” , recently launched at the University of Skövde, Sweden. Activities within the COSI project have significantly contributed to the design of the curriculum for this study programme and the discussion during the panel emphasised the need for competence in the area.

From April 2 to 5, the Dagstuhl Seminar 08142 "Combining the Advantages of Product Lines and Open Source" (http://www.dagstuhl.de/08142) was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl.
It was organised by COSI.



During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas can be found at: (http://drops.dagstuhl.de/portals/08142/)

Using open source software appears to be a profitable way to obtain good software. This is a result of several of its properties, ranging from effective feedback to the openness of the source. At a first glance open source and product line practices are conflicting.

= Activities =
The seminar was visited by 15 participants from the product line world and from open source communities. Most of them presented a position paper giving rise to a lot of discussion.

The position papers were divided in several sessions:
* Using open source practices in industrial software development
* Relationship with model driven development
* Use of open source software in product lines
* Business concerns

In addition several hours were spend on two discussion topics, selected during the first day of the seminar:
* tools and architecture
* practices and organisation

Call for papers
Special issue on Open Source Software and Product Lines
International Journal of Open Source Software & Processes (IJOSSP)
http://www.igi-global.com/journals/details.asp?id=7978

Editor-in-Chief: Stefan Koch, Vienna University of Economics and BA, Austria.

Published: Quarterly (both in Print and Electronic form)

Description of the topic Embedded industries have invested a lot in the introduction of software product lines in their software development. In addition, using open source software appears to be a profitable way to obtain good software. This is also applicable for organizations doing product line engineering. On the other hand, because of the diverse use of open source software, product line development is an attractive way of working in open source communities. In fact, the configuration mechanisms used in open source communities are applicable within software product lines as well. In addition, product line organizations are usually involved in distributed development, which works very efficiently within open source communities.
At present, there is limited interaction between the open source and product line development communities. The aim for the workshop is to explore what the two communities can learn from each other and to develop a better understanding of how the two communities can benefit from each other.
The special issue features papers on the following issues:


* Variability and reuse management practices in open source development
* Ownership, control and management of product line assets in an open source community
* Advantages and drawbacks of openness in product lines
* Mixing closed and open architectures in a product line
* Product line requirements, roadmaps and planning in open source development
* Open source asset management tools in product line development
* The meaning of domain and application engineering in an open source context
* Recognition and recovery of a product line in an open source asset base
* Licensing issues, and how product line architecture is affected by different kinds of licences
* Dealing with risks when combining open source and product lines, such as liability, warranties, patent infringements etc.
* Collaborating on product lines between companies through open source
* Innovative forms of business relationships within a product line, through open source usage
* Product line Company experiences on interacting with and stimulation of a healthy open source community
* Opportunities and obstacles in adopting open source practices in product line development
* Company experiences of opening parts of product lines

Paper submission process

The Special issue solicits papers, which integrate aspects from both the software product line and open source software. We expect paper of about 5000 words. Papers should be sent to the guest editors, Frank van der Linden and Björn Lundell. General submission guidelines of the journal can be found at: http://www.igi-global.com/development/author_info/guide.asp

Important dates

* October 15, 2008 - Submission deadline for papers
* November 20, 2008 - Acceptance notification
* January 5, 2009 - Final paper due


Frank van der Linden
Philips Healthcare


Björn Lundell
University of Skövde


Indicative Publications

Pohl, K., Böckle, G., and Van der Linden, F. (2005) Software Product Line Engineering, Springer Verlag ISBN 3-540-24372-0
Ågerfalk, P.J., Fitzgerald, B., Lings, B., Lundell, B., O’Brien, L. and Thiel, S. (2006) Open Source in the Software Product Line: An Inevitable Trajectory?, In 1st International Workshop on Open Source Software and Product Lines, 22 August, Baltimore, Maryland, http://www.sei.cmu.edu/splc2006/Agerfalk_paper.pdf
Feller, J., Finnegan, P., Hayes, J. and Lundell, B. (2006) Business Models for Open Source Software: Towards a Mature Understanding of the Concept and its Implications for Practice, Panel in The Second International Conference on Open Source Systems, 8-10 June,
http://oss2006.dti.unimi.it/index.php?panels.html#BusinessModels.
Lundell, B., Lings, B., Ågerfalk, P. and Fitzgerald, B. (2006) The Distributed Open Source Software Development Model: Observations on Communication, Coordination and Control, In The 14th European Conference on Information Systems, Gothenburg, 12-14 June [ CD-ROM ].
Lundell, B., Lings, B. and Lindqvist, E. (2006) Perceptions and Uptake of Open Source in Swedish Organisations, In Damiani, E., Fitzgerald, B., Scacchi, W. and Scotto, M. (Eds.) Open Source Systems: IFIP Working Group 2.13 Foundation Conference on Open Source Software – The Second International Conference on Open Source Systems, Springer, pp. 151-163. [ This paper received a best conference paper award]

On June 3, 2008, the COSI project organised a joint event together with Open Source Sweden, an industrial association established amongst Swedish Open Source companies. As the technical manager in COSI is also the chair of Open Source Sweden it was possible to quickly establish a constructive climate for close discussion. For COSI partners, the event was part of a COSI workshop organised in Skövde, Sweden.

Open Source Sweden is an industry association that supports the interests of Swedish Open Source companies. It seeks to maintain the interests of Swedish companies dedicated to supplying Open Source products, development and services. Its mission is to stimulate a healthy market for Software through the development, provision and support of products and services based on Open Source Software and Open Standards.

During this joint event there was a poster exhibition featuring a number of COSI case studies. Further, companies within Open Source Sweden also have an interest in communicating success stories from the Swedish Open Source landscape. Hence, each company in Open Source Sweden was also invited to exhibit a case study from their own organisation. Together, these resulted in a room full of posters presenting interesting Open Source experiences.

The aim of the exhibition was to give an overview of contemporary issues in the area, and to provide a basis for interaction between individuals. Overall, participants felt this joint event was highly successful and gave rise to stimulating discussions and good opportunities for networking.

The joint event also included a round table discussion with participants representing several companies in Open Source Sweden and a number of COSI partners.



The picture shows interaction between COSI and Open Source Sweden during the poster presentation.




The lunch session offered good opportunities for networking between COSI and Open Source Sweden:



The picture shows a discussion between representatives for a company in Open Source Sweden and a COSI partner during the joint event organised by COSI and Open Source Sweden in Skövde. The picture shows Hillar Loor, CEO of imCode Partner in a discussion with Vidar Langseid, the technical manager at eZ Systems.

GoOpen, a conference about
- sharing,
- collaboration,
- freedom and
- innovation,
was arranged in Oslo, Norway April 8-9th 2008.

The conference gathered 500 participants from both private and public sector. Keynote speaker Zak Greant from the Mozilla Foundation devoted a great deal of his time to the survey "Adoption of Open Source Software in Norwegian Software Industry", performed by Research Fellow Øyvind Hauge, Researcher Carl-Fredrik Sørensen, and Professor Reidar Conradi at NTNU.
The survey will be presented at The 4th International Conference on Open Source Systems in Milano September 2008.

The most important findings are:
- Almost half of the Norwegian software industry integrates open source components into their own products. These products are used in all branches.
- More than 30 % of the respondents of the survey have more than 40 % of their revenue from open source related products and services.
- About 16 % of the companies participate in the development of open source software and about 5 % of the companies provide their own open source products.
- The screening process got 739 responses and the main survey received 95 responses.

Juha-Pekka Juutilainen's master's thesis OSS Based Business Models in Commercial Companies has been submitted for review to Helsinki School of Economics department of Information System's Science. The thesis provides detailed and systematical analysis of business models existing in companies utilizing open source.

The research effort is a part of the COSI-project (Co-development using inner & Open source in Software Intensive products).

For more information, contact Juha-Pekka Juutilainen (juha-pekka.juutilainen at hse.fi)
The Master's thesis is available online for COSI-ITEA web pages.

OSS_Based_Business_Models_in_Commercial_Companies.pdf

Telecom I+D is a yearly conference sponsored and organized by mayor ICT suppliers and a university, the one belonging to the location each year.
A paper on the COSI project has been submited and accepted to be presented during the sesion taking place on Oct. 31.
The paper describes the COSI project in general terms and some of the results achived so far, and is written a (and has been presented) in spanish languaje..
It has had a good interest given the questions made at the end of the presention. Among others, the audience counted witha representative of the Spanish PA's.

The authors of the paper: Carlos Acuña, Fernando Usero, Josetxo Vicedo and Hugo Parada

Anna Paajanen's Master's Thesis Open Source Software License Decision was accepted and awarded grade excellent. The thesis describes the factors influencing OSS license decision from company perspective. The master's thesis research was conducted as a part of COSI project.


See Thesis from this link

Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, May 26-27 2007.

A paper with the title "Experiences from representing software architecture in a large industrial project using model driven development" was presented by the author Anders Mattsson/Combitech at the second workshop on SHAring and Reusing architectural Knowledge - Architecture, rationale, and Design Intent 2007, that was held in concjuction with the 29th Int. Conf. on Software Engineering (ICSE 2007).

The paper presented results from the COSI case study performed by Combitech in cooperation with Högskolan i Skövde regarding architectural work practices in model-driven inner source development.

A Bachelor's Thesis with a title "Stylebase for Eclipse. An open source tool to support the modeling of quality-driven software architecture" has been finished and published recently by Katja Henttonen, VTT.

Reference information:
Henttonen, Katja. 2007. Stylebase for Eclipse. An open source tool to support the modeling of quality-driven software architecture.
VTT, Espoo. 61 p. + app. 15 p. VTT Tiedotteita - Research Notes : 2387
ISBN 978-951-38-6925-0

Abstract:
Open source software has gained a lot of well-deserved attention during the last few years. Eclipse is one of the most successful open source communities providing an open development environment and an application lifecycle platform. Eclipse is a vendorneutral platform for integrating tools and services. My thesis work is a case study on
contributing to Eclipse. The contribution is a software architecture tool called Stylebase for Eclipse which is implemented as an extension a.k.a. plug-in to Eclipse.

Quality-driven architecture design is an approach to software architecture design which emphasizes the importance of qualities. Qualities are non-functional characteristics of a software system such as security or maintainability. Stylebase is a knowledge base of software patterns and architectural styles. It stores information that helps a software architect in selecting patterns that best support the desired quality goals. Stylebase for Eclipse is a tool for browsing and maintaining the stylebase. The purpose of the tool is to improve the quality of design and increase information sharing and re-use of
architectural models in development teams.

In the case study, the plug-in is first developed and, after that, a new open source community is formed around the plug-in project. In order to comply with the open source development model, modularity is treated as the most important non-functional requirement. In community building phase, efforts are concentrated on marketing the
new open source project and creating a good technical infrastructure for it.

The most interesting experiences gained during the study are related to various aspects of open source development. They are - among others - re-using code from other projects, licensing issues, tools to facilitate distributed development , and attracting new users and developers.

A paper "Support for Knowledge and Innovation Management in a Software Development Organization" discusses open source software portals from the knowledge management viewpoint and takes Nokia Inner Source portal as an example. The paper is published at Webist conference, 3-6 March, 2007 at Barcelona. http://www.webist.org/

Limerick, Ireland, June 14, 2007, results from an on-going investigation on Open Source in the embedded systems domain was reported at the International Workshop on Trust in Open Source Software (TOSS). This work is being conducted by researchers at the University of Skövde, in close collaboration with Combitech AB.

June 28, 2007, the technical manager in the COSI project, Björn Lundell, University of Skövde, participated in an Open Source event organised in the Network for OSS in the Nordic Countries. The workshop was led by Mats Östling (SALAR) and participants included Barbara Held (IDABC) together with representatives from the five Nordic countries (Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden). The event gave excellent networking opportunities during which participants explored common interests.

The picture shows (from left to right) representatives for the Finnish, Swedish and Danish industrial Open Source associations: Petri Räsänen (founder and director of COSS, Finland), Björn Lundell (University of Skövde & chair of Open Source Sweden), and Morten Kjærsgaard (chair of the Danish Open Source Business Association, Denmark).

June 8, 2007, a panel was held on “Open Source in Industrial Contexts” at the 15th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2007), in St. Gallen, Switzerland. In addition to representatives from the three COSI partners: Philips Medical (Frank van der Linden), Nokia (Pentti Marttiin) and University of Skövde (Björn Lundell), the panel also had representatives from the project “O3C Business Models” (Joe Feller and Pat Finnegan, who are both active in this IRCHSS-funded project). The planning and preparation for the panel was seen to be an excellent networking opportunity for participants from the COSI and O3C projects. The panel session stimulated discussion and interaction both amongst the panel members and with members of the audience.

The picture shows (from left to right) the six panellists: Björn Lundell (University of Skövde, panel chair), Joseph Feller (University College Cork), Patrick Finnegan (University College Cork), Frank van der Linden (Philips Medical), Penttii Marttiin (Nokia), Patrick Finnegan (University College Cork), and Joseph Feller (University College Cork).

April, 2007, the technical manager in the COSI project, Björn Lundell, University of Skövde, has been elected as the first chair of Open Source Sweden, an industrial Swedish Open Source Association. With this development we can look forward to significantly improved networking opportunities between COSI and the Swedish Open Source industry.

April 11, 2007, University of Skövde and Rey Juan Carlos University of Madrid organised an open seminar on “Open Source Solution for Business Strategies (or Relationships)”, with participants from a number of Swedish Open Source organisations. During the seminar, Andrés Leonardo Martínez Ortiz, Rey Juan Carlos University of Madrid, presented an overview of the MORFEO and Qualipso projects. The seminar was held in an informal atmosphere and stimulated significant interaction amongst participants. Discussions followed related to specific experiences from and aspects of collaboration between work packages in COSI.

The picture shows Andrés during his presentation of the MORFEO project.

WICSA 2007
The Sixth Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture took place 6-9 January 2007 in Mumbai, India.

A working session paper with a title:
"Role of Software Architecture in Open Source Communities" was presented in "emerging challenges" working session in the conference by the author Mari Matinlassi/VTT.

Software architecture has achieved a wellestablished and central role in software development. At the same time open source software development (OSSD) has emerged on the scene with more code centric approach. So far, the meaning of architecture in OSSD has not been revealed. This research studied the question by performing an inquiry in fifteen open source communities. The most important results of the inquiry were as follows. Structural viewpoint, i.e. components and relationships, is the most important viewpoint for open source developers. Architecture is
used for coarse grained or high-level architecture design and architecture is documented quite well, but documentation is out of date. Architecture is
documented for users and developers to understand the system. Communities design for modularity although evaluation of architecture quality is done implicitly without any special methods or tools.
Architecture cannot be explicitly seen as a communication element however, architecture guides acceptable changes in code.

From 26th of February to 2nd of March several meetings were held by COSI members at European Software Institute’s premises in Bilbao. Explotation and dissemination of the project results were two topics widely discussed during these meetings.

The COSI project is preparing a workshop on Open Source Software and Product Lines (OSSPL07), to be held in Limerick, Ireland.
The workshop is organised by Frank van der Linden (Philips Medical) and Björn Lundell (University of Skövde), and is co-located with the Third International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2007).
The OSSPL07 workshop follows on from a previous workshop (OSSPL06) on the same topic,held during the 10th International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC 2006) in Baltimore.

For more information, see:OSSPL07

The COSI case study general workshop has been held in Málaga, Spain, from 13th to 15th, December of 2006, with an attendance of around 40 people. The morning of the first day was shared with OSIRIS ITEA project, some activities related to dissemination of results along with exploitation and demos were perfomed during that morning. These activities helped to leverage the inks between the two ITEA projects and are a needed step in the direction of the COSIRIS cluster.

Bjorn Lundell gave a very interesting presentation on IST CALIBRE inputs to COSI during the second day. Calibration was also present at this workshop with a presentation given by Frank van der Linden. Calibration is hosted right now by COSI website and is a part of COSI exploitation.

The rest of the workshop has been very useful in order to analyze and develop the 16 case studies,that are central to the project. With these case studies we intend to put in practice the knowledge gathered in the first phase of COSI (State of the art) and provide feedback to third phase, that will try to improve the results obtained in the state of the art. Some of the case studies apply to more than one workpackage. Thus the links among these workpackages will be improved.

Interaction between work packages in COSI

November 24, 2006, Matti Rossi and Pentti Marttiin organised a research seminar at Helsinki School of Economics, Finland. Participants at this seminar included researchers and practitioners from the COSI partners: Helsinki School of Economics, Nokia and University of Skövde. During the seminar Björn Lundell, University of Skövde gave the presentation “Open Source in industrial contexts: reflections from CALIBRE and COSI”. Discussions followed related to the conduct of case studies and aspects of collaboration between work packages in COSI.

COSI partner on Advisory Board for Linuxworld Open Solutions Summit 2007

November 6, 2006, the technical manager in the COSI project, Björn Lundell, University of Skövde has accepted an invitation by IDC Nordic to join the Advisory Board for Linuxworld Open Solutions Summit 2007. The Summit is to be organised by (IDC Nordic) and Computer Sweden in Stockholm, September 5, 2007.

October 26, 2006, the afternoon, there was an ITEA review of the COSI project by ITEA.

Present from the COSI project was the PMT, Europartners office and Carl-Fredrik Sørensen. From ITEA side the following people were present at the review:

- Ronald Begeer, Philips, facilitator - Daniel Pilaud, Polyspace - Francisco Moya, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha - Moreno Sioli, Italtel - Rudolf Haggenmüller, ITEA chairman - Antoine Pery, ITEA programme manager

Genoa, Italy, October 1-6, 2006, Anders Mattsson, Combitech AB presented COSI results stemming from joint work with researchers at the University of Skövde at the 9th International Conference, MoDELS 2006. The results are from an analysis of heterogeneous tool environments are published in the associated Conference Proceedings, which is available from Springer Verlag.

Open Seminar

September 14, 2006 an Open Seminar was held on “Open Source in European and Swedish Industry” at the University of Skövde, Sweden. The seminar included a panel of representatives from the COSI project with an open discussion on opportunities and threats to Open Source in industry.

Networking with Swedish organisations

September 13-14, 2006, representatives from the COSI project management team held joint meetings with representatives from Swedish industry and public organisations interested in Open Source, in order to network and explore common interests.

COSI workshop on development process

September 12-13, 2006, the COSI work package on development process held a workshop at the University of Skövde, Sweden. The meeting made good progress, with 15 partners represented from the Netherlands, Finland, Norway, Spain, and Sweden. Parts of the workshop were organised in small groups and the pictures show discussions from two of these group sessions.

COSI "State of the art" workshop was held at Oulu, Finland on June 13-15 2006. The workshop act as a first milestone of the project. The first contributions of partners were presented. A set of provocative statements helped in creating an active dialogue between presenters and audience. Three work package meetings were held to discuss on specific business, process and architecture related issues: partner contributions, plans and new ideas.

COSI group photo was taken from the terrace of the conference room.