Open Source Software as a Scholarly Contribution

M.Sc. Defence and Seminar
Ali Lotfi
BSc, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada, 2003

The focus of this thesis is on the discussion of Open Source Software (OSS) as a scholarly contribution. Boyers proposed model of scholarship with four components of discovery, integration, application, and teaching is used as a framework showing there are different forms of scholarly activities as it relates to OSS. The existence of contribution within one or more Boyer categories is shown by grouping our case studies into three areas: 1. Robust implementation of common algorithm - an algorithm that had previously only been described on paper or only implemented in proprietary systems, 2. Infrastructure for research communities - an infrastructure for the development of research software, 3. Applying known Computing Science (CS) techniques to further research in another field - an application that supports research in CS or another field.

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 11:00 a.m. ASB 9896

M.Sc. Examining Committee

• Dr. Uwe Glaesser, Co-Supervisor
• Dr. Arthur (Ted) Kirkpatrick, Co-Supervisor
• Dr. Lou Hafer, Co-Supervisor
• Toby Donaldson, SFU, Examiner