Software patents have received a great deal of attention in the academic literature. Unfortunately, most of that attention has been devoted to the problem of whether software is or should be patentable subject matter. With roughly 40,000 software patents already issued, and the Federal Circuit...

Despite the popularity and myths regarding CRM as it changes the way how a company interacts with customers and the employees perform their jobs throughout the organization, there are many potential areas of failure in a CRM and overcoming these bottlenecks and pitfalls has become a point of...

Given the increasing competition in the software industry and the critical consequences of software errors, it has become important to develop methods for early forecasting of software quality. This research utilized a novel forecasting approach based on recent work in using prediction markets,...

Este trabajo plantea evaluar los desafíos y oportunidades de la industria de software y servicios informáticos en los países de la Argentina, Brasil y México. Se analizan para cada país los factores claves que determinan y condicionan el desarrollo de la industria a nivel local y global. Se...

The protectability (or not) of computer program interfaces, the legality of reverse engineering of program code to extract interface information and the reimplementation of interfaces in complementary or competing programs was deeply controversial in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For the past...

Open Source software, developed by a community of mostly volunteers programmers and available on the web free of charge, offers important opportunities to software firms. The availability of such free productive factor, in fact, cuts the development costs and, consequently, lowers the barriers...

The aim of this paper is to identify the stage of IT adoption in individual European economies, and to analyse the determinants of IT investment in a panel of EU countries. We first analyse the dynamics of IT investment expenditure in 15 European countries from 1992 until 2001 and, by means of a...

A large number of studies has been canvassed by the growing rates of diffusion of Open Source Software. However, a formal analysis of the process of competition between open–source and proprietary software is still missing. We propose an epidemic model of innovation diffusion to deal with the...

Many software firms offer a fully functional version of their products free of charge, for a limited trial time, to ease consumers’ uncertainty about the functionalities of their products and to help the diffusion of their new software. This paper examines the tradeoff between the effects of...

Programs that are online are all free for download, some of them must have a license for their use. Life in the information society brings advantages, but there are also risks. In the virtual world not only move network of friends, but the pirates, spies other websites. Removal of the applicable...