Research Opportunities in the Virtual Agora: Market Aspects of Open Resource Coalitions

Author: Mary Shaw

Position Paper for First Workshop on Economics-Driven Software Engineering Research, (EDSER-1), affiliated with the 21st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'99), May 1999.

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Abstract

For at least a decade, we have looked forward to an open market for software components and services. Recent advances in networking have created in the Internet a fertile environment for the creation and distribution of components, and we see a rich potential for value-added as well as primary goods. However, the economic infrastructure for an open market in software resources is still lacking, and support for automation of the marketplace is scant indeed. The prospect of automatically identifying, procuring, and integrating network-based resources intensifies the need to provide a robust economic infrastructure. We sketch the requirements for an electronic marketplace in software goods and services, explores some of the remaining shortfalls, and identify research opportunities.

Keywords: software marketplace, distributed open systems, resource coalitions.

Brought to you by the Composable Software Systems Research Group in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

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