Diomidis Spinellis

Georgios Gousios

What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and maintainable software architecture? Beautiful Architecture answers this question through a collection of intriguing essays from more than a dozen of today's leading software designers and architects. In each essay, contributors present a notable software architecture, and analyze what makes it innovative and ideal for its purpose. Some of the engineers in this book reveal how they developed a specific project, including decisions they faced and tradeoffs they made. Others take a step back to investigate how certain architectural aspects have influenced computing as a whole. With this book, you'll discover: How Facebook's architecture is the basis for a data-centric application ecosystem The effect of Xen's well-designed architecture on the way operating systems evolve How community processes within the KDE project help software architectures evolve from rough sketches to beautiful systems How creeping featurism has helped GNU Emacs gain unanticipated functionality The magic behind the Jikes RVM self-optimizable, self-hosting runtime Design choices and building blocks that made Tandem the choice platform in high-availability environments for over two decades Differences and similarities between object-oriented and functional architectural views How architectures can affect the software's evolution and the developers' engagement Go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to design elegant software architecture, and how it can shape the way you approach your own projects, with Beautiful Architecture.

Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design

Beautiful Architecture

Stephanos Androutsellis-Theotokis

Maria Kechagia

Open Source Software: A Survey from 10,000 Feet provides an overview of the history, development, and applications of open source software (OSS). OSS is software distributed with a license allowing access to its source code, free redistribution, the creation of derived works, and unrestricted use. The history of open source software can be traced back to the 1950s. Open source applications cover most areas of consumer and business software. The organization of open source development projects often differs from proprietary ones in terms of their organizational structure, membership, leadership, contribution policies and quality control. Behind a successful OSS project is its community, ranging from core developers to passive users. The key defining element of open source software is its license, which must satisfy a list of important requirements. There are numerous open source licenses, and they mainly differ in how they treat derived software: some contain provisions that maintain its availability in open source form, while others allow more flexibility. The emergence of open source software is fueling the economy as a whole through its widespread adoption as a cheap alternative to pricey proprietary products and as a driver behind many successful e-business ventures. Open source is also directly affecting specific sectors: the software development industry through competition and new business opportunities; hardware development through lower cost and barriers of entry, consumer-led innovation and policy enforcement difficulties; academia through valuable opportunities for research and student involvement in real-world applications, as well as the availability of software tools and the provision of pioneering new courses. It can lead to new design, production, marketing, and business models, as well as ways to develop large complex software systems in an organic manner. Challenges lie ahead, and problems still need to be overcome, so the potential for future research on OSS is large. More important however is the ability of open source development models to democratize technology and innovation.

Georgios Gousios

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