Need help finding reliable sources for a paper

[Vaktathi]

Hi all, I come to you in desperation.

I'm doing a project for an Economics class on the various market and governmental failures present in the current software market (e.g monopolization of OS market, failure of competition, patent issues, licensing and distribution issues)

However, I am finding it difficult to find reliable sources on the issue that are not Blogs, Trade Journals (e.g. American Petroleum institute for Oil companies putting out articles and studies would not be usable should I be doing a project on them) or Wiki articles.

if anyone could help me find government and/or nonprofit and/or actual academic studies of the issue it would be greatly appreciated as I am having trouble finding such sources.

-thanks!

EDIT: Mods, if you feel this does not belong here feel free to delete, I just figured this may be the best place.

 

[drag]

Everything is biased. There is no such thing and unbiased anything.

Everything has to be paid for by somebody and only the people that have a stake in software are the ones willing to pay money for it. And it's very expensive.

Plus everybody is very secretive for a veriaty of reasons.


The biggest study I know of is http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf

It's a study from the EU about the economic impact of FLOSS software in Europe.

It's probably as unbiased as you can get, but of course like all government based studies the people involved have their own agendas. Microsoft is involved in a number of anti-competitive lawsuites in the EU and the EU folks would most likely want to avoid having everything dependant on American-based corporations for their infrastructure.

Otherwise you can find stuff from professional analists like Gartner institute. They have their own problems. They'll work for whoever is willing to pay them.
Plus they do not publish their work freely, it can be very expensive.

 

[Vaktathi]

yeah, I understand nothing is unbiased, but I need articles that can at least pass academic muster (and so far I've found few that arent Blogs, random net articles from things like PC World etc, or tradejournal articles)

thanks for the link and the advice ,I know many people are probably reading this thinking "lazy kid needs to do his own research" but I've been spending quite awhile on this and can't find much that I'll be able to actually cite in the project.

 

[drag]

This sort of thing would make a nice doctoral thesis in accounting or something like that. 🙂

The internet is the equivelent of the gutenberg press in terms of impact it is having on humanity. Without the internet stuff like Linux and OSS software would be nearly impossible. It absolutely depends on distributed development and users being the developers (in terms of large companies) Being able to map out the impact of that versus traditional development methodologies would be be exceptionally difficult.

I wish I can help you out.

but with this sort of thing even knowing who actually uses Linux is nearly impossible. Nobody knows and keeps track of what companies actually use, it's all kept secret. They need to keep rivals from knowing what they are using so they don't use it themselves. They need to watch out and not piss off Microsoft who supplies a great deal of the software they use (which according to the EULA can trigger licensing audit at any time and you have to comply.. which most companies would fail at in one way or another)

The only reliable figures for this stuff is with reports from large publicly owned corporations like IBM or Dell. In those they will reveil what sorts of computers they sell and what OSes they sell with them. Using this you can kinda guess at what companies are using internally.