Open-Source Softwares have emerged as a cross-disciplinary paradigm for a large spectrum of computing applications. It helps in many ways, keeping the software market away from monopolies and providing innovative solutions. It not only helps the organizations to keep a control on the cost of development and deployment but also kept them ahead in terms of technology and robustness. OSS has also changed the way software applications are architected, deployed, and consumed but also they are engineered to provide large distributed cross-platforms and frameworks. 

Al-Khawarizmi Institute of Computer Science, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, (in collaboration with IEEE, USA) is organizing a two-day conference to invite researchers and practitioners from across the world to share their ideas and experiences related to the state-of-the-art and the future of open-source software. 4th International Conference on Open Source System and Technology (ICOSST-2010) thus aims at consolidating as an international forum where a diverse audience of OSS researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and public administration will come together to present research papers and tutorials addressing the state-of-the-art open-source research and development in the critical areas such as E-Business, E-Government, Telecommunication, Enterprise Security, Healthcare, Higher Education and Research, Enterprise Resource Planning, and Educational Institution Management and Administration. Open-source system development poses a number of research challenges related to open-source work practices, development processes, applications, and tools. However, ICOSST-2010 will focus on achieving three main goals.

• Developing open-source stand-alone software tools, toolsets, and complete integrated development environments (IDEs) that support and facilitate modern methodologies (or process areas) for developing open, complex, and robust enterprise information systems.
• Developing open-standards based middlewares and frameworks that facilitate development and deployment of state-of-the-art and upcoming domain in computing.
• Focusing not just on software tools that work in a single IDE, or tools that only help fix a single project. Rather, the focus will be basic developer tools, with categories like modeling, editors, build automation, continuous integration, logging, debugging, tracing, performance, code generators, document generators, installers, search & rule engines, database, information and knowledge management, middlewares and frameworks, etc. More generally, keeping in view the current state-of-the-art software practices related to service-oriented software engineering, aspect-oriented software development, and agile software development, the purpose explore the OSS involvement in following areas:
  • Software engineering
  • Database management
  • System integration
  • Software quality assurance
  • Human Machine Interaction (HCI)
  • Project management
  • Embedded /Real-time systems
  • Energy Management Systems
  • Processor Architectures & Parallelization
  • Configuration management
  • Parallel & distributed systems
  • Information Security
  • Standards & frameworks
  • Computer Networks
  • Kernel and Device Development
  • Ubiquitous Computing
  • Service Oriented Computing
  • Wireless Sensor Networks