Latest Publications on Industry and Research
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Options to have your open-source software and sustain it too
I’m just off a call with a public official discussing their options for an open source future. The topic was the domain-specific software needed by any agency, institution, or government (not generic office or infrastructure software). How to have software for managing health insurance, or school planning, or public transport to be open-source software? At…
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![Balancing technology heterogeneity in microservice architectures [EMSE Journal]](https://dirkriehle.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/10672-lisbon-setubal-restaurant-river-ponto-final-300x150.jpg)
Balancing technology heterogeneity in microservice architectures [EMSE Journal]
Abstract Microservices are a popular architectural style that allows systems to be built from a potentially large number of microservices, all of which can be developed independently and by their own teams. As a resulting benefit, development teams can choose the technologies optimal for their microservices, leading to a diversity of different programming languages, frameworks,…
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![Ensuring syntactic interoperability using consumer-driven contract testing [STVR Journal]](https://dirkriehle.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/10671-toronto-union-station-walkway-300x150.jpg)
Ensuring syntactic interoperability using consumer-driven contract testing [STVR Journal]
Abstract Integrating services in service-based architectures is a major concern and challenge to their developers. A key problem is that today’s compilers cannot ensure syntactic interoperability of web APIs. Without further help, invalid calls surface only at runtime. Microservice-based architectures exacerbate this problem due to their use of polyglot software stacks and independent deployments. As…
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From data to action: Building healthy and sustainable open source projects (Dawn Foster, IEEE Computer)
I’m happy to report that the 35th article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. As always, please consider writing an article proposal! Title From data to action: Building healthy and sustainable open source projects Keywords None Authors Dawn Foster Publication Computer vol. 58, no. 6 (June 2025), pp. 74-78 Abstract:…
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Is AI killing open source?
tl;dr Nah, things keep changing, but if anything, AI only helps open source sharpen its profile as the way to go about collaboratively developing high-quality broadly-usable software. Those who were around twenty years ago may remember how folks were wondering whether the cloud was going to kill open source. How did this work out? It…
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The new coming relicensing scare?
What if commercial source-available vendors stopped licensing their product under their source-available license and only offered a traditional commercial license? In my current research interviews on commercial open source, two alternative intellectual property (IP) strategies are becoming visible: (1) Stay with open source and rely on trademarks, quality, and speed and (2) forego open source…