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Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

This paper aims to propose a maker’s approach to teaching an operating systems (OSs) course in which students apply knowledge of OSs to making a toy robot by focusing on input/outputs, hardware devices and system programming.

Classroom action research is involved in this study.

After the course was taught in this maker’s approach in two consecutive school years, some observations were reported. Students were enthusiastic in doing a series of assignments leading to the completion of a toy robot that follows a black line on the ground. In addition to enjoying the learning process by making tangible products, the students were excited to be able to demonstrate the skills and knowledge they learned with the robots they made.

The research results were based mainly on the instructor’s observations during the lectures and labs.

Lessons from this study can inspire other instructors to turn traditional engineering courses into maker courses to attract students who enjoy making. Industry should welcome engineering graduates to join the companies with more hands-on experiences they have gained from maker courses.

Although the maker movement has attracted much attention in K12 education, there is little research that studies how this maker spirit can be incorporated in traditional engineering courses that focus mainly on theories or software.

Including electronics and mechanical components in programming assignments would bring surprising effects on students’ motivation in learning.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how and why virtual machines (VMs) and cloud computing and related development environments built on cloud-based resources may be used to support and enhance the technological elements of library and information science (LIS) education.

It is based on analysis of available technologies and relevant applications.

Cloud computing and virtualization offer a basis for creating a robust computing infrastructure for LIS education.

In the context of LIS education, cloud computing is relevant in two respects. First, many important library and archival services already rely heavily on cloud-based infrastructures, and in the near future, cloud computing is likely to define a much larger part of the computing environment on which libraries and archives rely. Second, cloud computing affords a highly flexible and efficient environment that is ideal for learning about VMs, operating systems and a wide variety of applications. What is more important, it constitutes an environment for teaching and learning that is vastly superior to the ones that currently support most LIS degree programs. From a pedagogical perspective, the key aspect of teaching and learning in the cloud environment is the VM. So, the article focuses a significant portion of its attentions on questions related to the deployment and use of VMs and Linux Containers, within and without cloud-based infrastructures, as means of learning about computer systems, applications and networking and achieving an understanding of essential aspects of both cloud computing and VM environments.

Based on a search of available literature in computer science and library and information science, the paper has no counterparts.

In today's e‐business, system downtime is an unacceptable option since each hour, even minute of downtime may generate negative financial effects. In order to stay competitive, e‐business must be continuous from a data availability perspective and agile with regard to data access. Therefore, there is a need for an information system which can support such a kind of business which will have high availability ratios. This study seeks to address this issue.

A systems approach has been used. Methodological framework is based on a MS/OR‐based definition of a system given by C.W. Churchman.

The paper presents a framework for the development of an e‐business‐oriented information system from business continuance perspective. It identifies high system availability and agile data access as two critical attributes in designing information systems for e‐business. In addition, it identifies two sets of information technologies (business continuity and business agility drivers) that are crucial in developing such information systems.

The presented framework can be used while selecting an appropriate operating platform in order to achieve higher levels of continuous computing.

Systems approach as defined by C.W. Churchman has been applied in the field of information systems for e‐business continuance.

The main purpose of the paper is timing analysis of mixed critical applications on the multicore system to identify an efficient task scheduling mechanism to achieve three main objectives improving schedulability, achieving reliability and minimizing the number of cores used. The rise in transient faults in embedded systems due to the use of low-cost processors has led to the use of fault-tolerant scheduling and mapping techniques.

The paper opted for a simulation-based study. The simulation of mixed critical applications, like air traffic control systems and synthetic workloads, is carried out using a litmus-real time testbed on an Ubuntu machine. The heuristic algorithms for task allocation based on utilization factors and task criticalities are proposed for partitioned approaches with multiple objectives.

Both partitioned earliest deadline first (EDF) with the utilization-based heuristic and EDF-virtual deadline (VD) with a criticality-based heuristic for allocation works well, as it schedules the air traffic system with a 98% success ratio (SR) using only three processor cores with transient faults being handled by the active backup of the tasks. With synthetic task loads, the proposed criticality-based heuristic works well with EDF-VD, as the SR is 94%. The validation of the proposed heuristic is done with a global and partitioned approach of scheduling, considering active backups to make the system reliable. There is an improvement in SR by 11% as compared to the global approach and a 17% improvement in comparison with the partitioned fixed-priority approach with only three processor cores being used.

The simulations of mixed critical tasks are carried out on a real-time kernel based on Linux and are generalizable in Linux-based environments.

The rise in transient faults in embedded systems due to the use of low-cost processors has led to the use of fault-tolerant scheduling and mapping techniques.

This paper fulfills an identified need to have multi-objective task scheduling in a mixed critical system. The timing analysis helps to identify performance risks and assess alternative architectures used to achieve reliability in terms of transient faults.

The paper aims at identifying key information technology enablers for business continuance.

The paper provides an analysis of the issues surrounding communication technology downtime and business continuity.

To be competitive, today's business has to be continuous from a data availability perspective and agile with regard to data access. System and/or application downtime are not an option in modern business since each hour, even minute, of downtime may generate negative financial effects. A framework for the design and implementation of a server operating environment for business continuance is presented.

Analyses an important issue in the business environment.

In times of open and distributed innovation, many innovation activities that are important for firms' products and services take place beyond the boundaries of the firm and thus beyond firms' direct control. A prime example for this phenomenon is open source software (OSS) development, where multiple actors contribute to a public good, which is also integrated into company-owned software products. Despite the importance of aligning community work on the public good with own in-house development efforts, firms have limited options to directly control the OSS project or the project's outcome. This research reflects on resource deployment control, a control mode in which firms assign own developers to work for an OSS project to influence the OSS project, and tests hypotheses on individual developer levels.

This research tests the effect of perceived resource deployment control on opinion leadership by analyzing employed Linux kernel developers.

The findings show that developers who perceive being assigned to an OSS project to enact control also exhibit opinion leadership. This research also investigates boundary conditions such as the OSS business model a firm operates and the reputation developers assign to the developers' employer.

This research is the first that is devoted to resource deployment control, and the research closes with a discussion of implications for control theory and the management of innovation beyond firm boundaries.

The paper has three purposes: the first is to provide a deeper understanding of the ideology and work practices of free and open source software development, the second to characterize the free software movement as a new type of computerization movement and the third to present a conceptual diagram and framework with an analysis showing how the free software computerization movement has evolved into an occupational community.

Qualitative data were collected over a four year period using a virtual ethnography in a study of free and open source software development and, in particular, a study of a free software community, GNUenterprise, located at www.gnuenterprise.org, which has the goal of developing a free enterprise resource planning software system.

It is concluded that the ideology of the free software movement continues to be one of the factors which mobilize people to contribute to free and open source software development. This movement represents a new type of computerization movement which promotes the investment of time in learning a new software development process instead of investment of money in the acquisition and use of new technology.

The research findings are limited by a detailed study of only one free software development project.

This paper is of significance to software developers and managers of firms who wish to incorporate free and open source software into their companies.

This research presents an original conceptual diagram and framework for how computerization movements have emerged into an occupational community.

A unified application management framework for Linux and Java applications on mobile phones is presented. Although Java‐based applications for mobile phones are in strong demand, the complexity of interaction between these platform independent programs and the core functionality of mobile phones has made software development difficult. The unified framework presented here provides uniform application state management and inter‐application communication between Java based and operating‐system specific applications, allowing native Linux applications to be directly replaced with the equivalent Java application. The framework is described in detail and a trial implementation of the system is evaluated.