OSS 2018 - 14th International Conference on Open Source Systems

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) has had a disruptive effect on the software industry and the ways that organizations and individuals create, distribute, acquire, and use software and software-based services. Its adoption continues to grow among businesses, governments, and other organizations. FLOSS remains important for educators and researchers, as well as an important aspect of e-government, smart cities, and information society initiatives, providing access to high-quality software and the code used to create it. Open source enterprise software has reached its highest point of popularity, since more and more organizations recognize the benefits that FLOSS offers and, are bringing open source software into their processes and even building whole businesses around it. The implementation of open frameworks, containers and repositories allows companies and researchers to build on a homogeneous cloud infrastructure, where they care less about the infrastructure and more about the services that power it.
The FLOSS movement has created new kinds of opportunities such as the emergence of new business models, knowledge exchange mechanisms, and collective development approaches. It has also created new challenges, by introducing openness as a pervasive problem solving strategy in various problem domains. FLOSS can be complex, widespread and cross-cultural and consequently, requires an interdisciplinary understanding of their technical, economic, legal, and socio-cultural dynamics.
The goal of 14th International Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2018, is to provide an international forum where a diverse community of professionals from academia, industry, and the public sector, and diverse FLOSS initiatives can come together to share research findings and practical experiences. The conference is also a forum to provide information and education to practitioners, identify directions for further research, and to be an ongoing platform for technology transfer, no matter which form of FLOSS is being pursued.