oops - forgot two more papers

Hello community,

Dissertation work has made a complete mess of my email box :) Here are 
two more papers!

Best

Karim <still freezing in Boston>

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Paper 5
Authors
Ioannis Samoladas, Ioannis Stamelos

Title
Assessing Free/Open Source Software Quality
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/samoladasstamelos.pdf

Abstract:
According to its proponents, one of the most acclaimed advantages of 
Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) is its superior quality. However, this 
suggestion is an open issue, since there is little concrete evidence to 
justify whether F/OSS quality is indeed better or worse than that of 
proprietary software products. The general perspective of this article 
is to discuss the current status of F/OSS quality and to assess its 
performance in various aspects of quality, based on existing literature. 
Specifically, this article will provide some answers to various 
questions raised by the assertion concerning the quality of F/OSS. In 
this regard issues addressed in this article include the quality 
framework, through which F/OSS quality should be investigated and the 
performance of F/OSS in various quality factors within this quality 
framework. Answers to these issues are given by providing evidence from 
various research papers, empirical studies and reports based on 
experience about the quality of F/OSS products. The overall results seem 
to indicate that F/OSS has achieved an acceptable level of quality, 
although there is more to be done in order to outperform proprietary 
software.


Paper 6
Author:
Imhorst, Christian

Title:
Anarchy and Source Code - What does the Free Software Movement have to 
do with Anarchism?
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/imhorst.pdf

Abstract:
What does the hacker ethic have to do with anarchism? Why does Richard 
Stallman, an outstanding personality of the free software movement, 
described himself as an anarchist? We should not imagine the anarchists 
of the Free Software Movement to be like the cartoon image: A scruffy 
looking lunatic, with a crazy glint in his eyes and bristling with 
weapons. Instead of chaos, Stallman postulates a new form of order for 
the intellectual property in the terms of the hacker ethic - the access 
to knowledge should be free, decentralized, anti-bureaucratic and 
anti-authoritarian.

-- 
Karim R. Lakhani
MIT Sloan | The Boston Consulting Group
Mobile: +1 (617) 851-1224
http://spoudaiospaizen.net
http://web.mit.edu/lakhani/www | http://opensource.mit.edu