Computer software patents: Some perspectives and misunderstandings

The importance that in-house software plays today in many organizations is without question. Perspectives of efficiencies, effectiveness, competitive advantage, and so on are but three areas where such applications exist. Many organizations have adopted measures to protect such software as a specific type of intellectual property. In the 1990s quite often the form of protection taken is software patents. The understanding and enthusiasm about software patents that is exhibited by organizations is not often shared by information systems researchers, however. For the most part, IS researchers dismiss software patents as an appropriate protective measure. This paper presents some background on patents and their applicability to software. Some US and international perspectives are also discussed to provide the reader with a somewhat broader perspective. We then discuss several IS research endeavors that either dismiss patents, or treat them incorrectly. We conclude with a research agenda for IS researchers. the Department of Computer Information Systems & Quantitative Analysis, University of Arkansas. She has conducted extensive research in the area of the law and information technology. Her published research has appeared in MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Knowledge and Policy. His research interests include examination of the strategic aspects of information systems and the relationship between the law and information technology. His research has been published in Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, and the Journal of Management Information Systems. Her current research is focused on interogranizational systems and the human relationships that exist in parallel to these systems.     

Development of computational models of emotions: A software engineering perspective

Computational Models of Emotions (CMEs) are software systems designed to explain the phenomenon of emotions. The mechanisms implemented in this type of computational models are based on human emotion theories reported in the literature and designed to provide intelligent agents with affective capabilities and improve human-computer interaction. However, despite the growing interest in this type of models, the development process of CMEs does not seem to follow formal software methodologies. In this paper, we present an analysis of CMEs from a software engineering perspective. We aim to identify what elements of software engineering are used in the development process of CMEs and to demonstrate how some software engineering techniques may support and improve their development process. We discuss a series of challenges to be addressed in order to take advantage of software engineering techniques: (1) definition of guidelines to help decide which emotion theories should be implemented computationally, (2) homogenization of terms about human emotions, their components, phases, and cycles implemented in CMEs, (3) design of CMEs whose components can be reusable, (4) definition of standard criteria for comparative analysis between CMEs, (5) identification of software engineering principles, concepts, and design practices useful in the construction of CMEs, and (6) definition of standard frameworks to validate CMEs.     

A developmental perspective on the ideal of reason in American constitutional law

The ideal of reason is central to contemporary accounts of citizenship in American constitutional law. The individual capacity for reasoned choice lies closely aligned with the constitutional values of personal liberty and democratic self-government as they have evolved in Supreme Court decisions over the past century. Yet as presently conceived, the ideal of reason in constitutional law overlooks the process by which individuals actually acquire the capacity to choose their own values and commitments or to engage in reasoned thinking about collective ends. This paper argues that we cannot hope to sustain and foster a constitutional polity committed to the principles of individual liberty and democratic self-government without knowing something about how individual citizens come to possess this requisite skill of mind. A developmental perspective on reason in constitutional law provides a framework for examining the source and contours of the psychological skills that make it possible to lead an autonomous, self-directed life and to participate meaningfully in the processes of democratic self-government. Developmental psychology, together with research in related fields, provides empirical support for the proposition that the psychological capacity for reasoned thinking has its roots in the early caregiving relationship. Thus, a comprehensive and integrated constitutional family law must recognize the role of early caregiving in the political socialization of children. This developmental approach offers a substantial reworking of constitutional doctrine in the areas of family privacy, parental rights, congressional power, and affirmative welfare rights.     

Open source and these United States

Over the past forty years a collaborative form of systems development has evolved on the electronic networks of the world. In the wake of the information technology revolution has come a proven method for developing, deploying, and maintaining these systems. This method, developed under the auspices of Department of Defense research grants, has resulted in the most successful and reliable software in existence. The method, based on collaborative intelligence, peer review and functional evolution, has rippled through the world of Information Technology. Its success depends on the uninhibited distribution of the currency of this realm: the source code, documentation and data that are the building blocks of complex information systems. To enhance collaboration and protect its creators, cutting edge source code is commonly released under Open Source licensing. The associated electronic information is released under open content licensing. Together, I call this duo Open Licensing. The Department of Defense can realize significant gains by the formal adoption, support and use of open licensed systems. We can lower costs and improve the quality of our systems and the speed at which they are developed. Open Licensing can improve the morale and retention of airmen and improve our ability to defend the nation. These benefits are accessible at any point in the acquisition cycle and even benefit deployed and operational systems. Open Licensing can reduce acquisition, development, maintenance and support costs and increased interoperability among our own systems and those of our allies. He has been stationed at the Pentagon and Phillips Laboratory. In addition to his military duties, he has taught at George Washington University and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. He has an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and graduate degrees in Business Administration and Computer Science.     

Rethinking free, libre and open source software

This special issue includes seven articles that make significant contribution to the literature pertaining to knowledge and public policy around Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). Focusing on questions in two themes (i) motivation and organization and (ii) public policy, the articles in this volume develop new analytic models and report on new empirical findings, as an important step in bridging the wide gap that exists in public policy literature around FLOSS. Warning against rhetorical pitfalls that have been prevalent in FLOSS research, this introduction starts with a short history of FLOSS development, continues with a brief thematic literature review and review of the misconceptions surrounding FLOSS, and concludes with a first introduction of the articles that follow. He is part of the Dutch Institute of Government (NIG), the research school for public administration and political science. His research focuses on the organization of open source communities. He received two grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for research related to open source communities. The first grant was to study the interplay between intellectual property rights and open source communities. The results are published in Governing the Virtual Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He has written numerous articles on open source, which have appeared in journals like Electronic Markets; Knowledge, Technology and Policy; and the International Journal of IT Standards & Standardisation Research. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of York (UK) in 2004. Her Ph.D. research investigated the heterogeneity and contingency in the Free, Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) social worlds, which is based on a constellation of hacking practices, from the sociological perspective. Her principal research interests center on FLOSS studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), virtual communities and knowledge-sharing. Shay is also a fellow at The Information Society Project at the Yale Law School. Shay holds a B.Sc. in computer science and a B.A. in philosophy, magna cum laude, from Tel-Aviv University, and an M.A. from New York University where his interdisciplinary research thesis focused on the political economy of free and open source software and file sharing networks. Shay is an entrepreneur that co-founded two software start-up companies, and was involved for several years in cutting edge software research, combining open source and proprietary software.     

Government policy toward open source software: The puzzles of neutrality and competition

For a variety of policy reasons, governments throughout the world are now adopting different legislative and administrative strategies that support the development of FLOSS. Some governments have actually begun to procure FLOSS, whereas others have channeled public funds to large-scale FLOSS projects. This study demonstrates both the benefits and the risks of government policy favoring FLOSS from the perspective of economics, technology, and politics, and to further analyze whether these same policy goals can be achieved through government support of FLOSS. The most fundamental argument of the study is that, in lending its support to FLOSS, the difference between a government user and a business user is that the government should take into account society’s long-term interests, not merely its own interests as a consumer. His research interests include free/open source software, intellectual property, and digital technology policy.     

Imagery perspective and source monitoring in imagination inflation

The present experiments suggest that imagery perspective—first person (own) versus third person (observer’s)—influences source-monitoring judgments. Imagination inflation (Garry, Manning, Loftus, &; Sherman, 1996) occurs when imaginary experience with events is mistaken for real experience. In Experiment 1, the perspective used to visualize real past events depended on memory test wording (“remember doing?” vs. “happened to you?”). Experiment 2 manipulated the perspective used to visually imagine counterfactual events and showed that the effect on imagination inflation depended on memory test wording. Imagination inflation was most likely when memory test wording encouraged participants to visualize real events from the same perspective as they had used to imagine counterfactual ones. Imagination inflation may result not simply from having created imaginary representations of events, but also from having created representations that match the decision criteria used in source monitoring.     

Hierarchy and centralization in free and open source software team communications

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams provide an interesting and convenient setting for studying distributed work. We begin by answering perhaps the most basic question: what is the social structure of these teams? We conducted social network analyses of bug-fixing interactions from three repositories: Sourceforge, GNU Savannah and Apache Bugzilla. We find that some OSS teams are highly centralized, but contrary to expectation, others are not. Projects are mostly quite hierarchical on four measures of hierarchy, consistent with past research but contrary to the naive image of these projects. Furthermore, we find that the level of centralization is negatively correlated with project size, suggesting that larger projects become more modular, or possibly that becoming more modular is a key to growth. The paper makes a further methodological contribution by identifying appropriate analysis approaches for interaction data. We conclude by sketching directions for future research.     

Open source standardization: The rise of linux in the network era

To attract complementary assets, firms that sponsor proprietary de facto compatibility standards must trade off control of the standard against the imperative for adoption. For example, Microsoft and Intel in turn gained pervasive adoption of their technologies by appropriating only a single layer of the standards architecture and encouraging competition in other layers. In reaction to such proprietary strategies, the open source movement relinquished control to maximize adoption. To illustrate this, we examine the rise of the Linux operating system from 1995–2001, particularly the motivations of organizational buyers and suppliers of complementary assets, and Microsoft’s reaction to its success.     

Metronome LKM: An open source virtual keyboard driver to measure experiment software latencies

Experiment software is often used to measure reaction times gathered with keyboards or other input devices. In previous studies, the accuracy and precision of time stamps has been assessed through several means: (a) generating accurate square wave signals from an external device connected to the parallel port of the computer running the experiment software, (b) triggering the typematic repeat feature of some keyboards to get an evenly separated series of keypress events, or (c) using a solenoid handled by a microcontroller to press the input device (keyboard, mouse button, touch screen) that will be used in the experimental setup. Despite the advantages of these approaches in some contexts, none of them can isolate the measurement error caused by the experiment software itself. Metronome LKM provides a virtual keyboard to assess an experiment’s software. Using this open source driver, researchers can generate keypress events using high-resolution timers and compare the time stamps collected by the experiment software with those gathered by Metronome LKM (with nanosecond resolution). Our software is highly configurable (in terms of keys pressed, intervals, SysRq activation) and runs on 2.6–4.8 Linux kernels.     

Euthanasia: A Buddhist perspective

This paper introduces basic Buddhist cosmology and ethical teachings, emphasizing the concepts of rebirth and Karma. There follows a discussion of the Buddhist view of illness and its causes. Using these introductory concepts, the Buddhist view on euthanasia is explored and contrasted with the views of Marvin Kohl, a leading proponent of euthanasia. It is shown that Buddhism prohibits euthanasia as an option for the terminally ill but instead advocates hospice care. The paper is offered to expand the current dialogue on bioethical issues beyond the Judeo-Christian perspective.     

Winnicott: A research perspective

This paper describes research conducted over the past twenty years that was informed by Winnicott's thinking on the importance for child development of the early mother-infant relationship.     

Rationalism and empiricism: A new perspective

Though classical and twentieth-century versions of empiricism and rationalism fail in their aims, as does the Kantian attempt at a compromise between those views, there are residues of those views that play important roles in the scientific enterprise. Those residue, and their scientific roles, are examined in this paper.     

Psychopathy: A psychobiological perspective

After critically examining the concept of psychopathy and reviewing the major existing theories of psychopathy in the light of a psychobiological conception of abnormal behaviour (Öhman, 1981), this paper attempts to present an integrated, psychobiological model of psychopathy. Essentially this analyses psychopathy in terms of the predisposing influences, the triggering environmental events which initiate psychopathic behaviour, and the neurophsychological mechanisms which mediate it. It is suggested that individuals who show chronic antisocial behaviour, conforming to the North American term ‘sociopath’, may demonstrate a maturational deficit but do not necessarily show a psychopathic personality disorder. The latter is said to be characterised, at a personality trait level, by high Impulsiveness and Psychopathy (Blackburn, 1982 a, b), reflecting interactive deficits in goal direction and affect. At a dynamic (state) level, a psychopathic personality disorder is said to be characterised by a lack of coping, reflecting either, in the case of the secondary psychopath, a deficit in primary appraisal, (over-perception of threat), or in the case of the primary psychopath, a deficit in secondary appraisal (low perceived control over aversive environmental events). It is further suggested that a genetic predisposition to social withdrawal and exposure to an uncontrollably aversive early environment may interact to predispose an individual to develop a psychopathic personality disorder in adulthood.