Open Source and The Web-based Periodicals: A Compared Study

Open Source software such as Linux, OpenOffice.org and Firefox, are currently the topic of a number of researches. At the present time, several migrations of thousands of desktops are ongoing in different places in Europe. Italy, Spain, Germany, France and Austria are leading experimentations, while the United Kingdom seems to be unaffected by this stream. In this paper we aim to investigate the role of the media in the diffusion of Open Source, analysing three web-based periodicals from Italy, United Kingdom and USA. The influence of the media in our society is wide and we have to look to that direction if we want to seriously investigate the in-depth causes of the different trend. Nevertheless, our results do not show a picture that will be familiar to many researchers of the field