Software Research and the Industry

These days, I get involved in a lot of discussions about open source economics. Usually, they lead to an invitation to present our research and clarify “how open source works” to the audience. I’ve found it helpful to distinguish these three rather different areas of open source economics: (1) direct profits, (2) public welfare, (3) labor market. In more detail:

• Direct profits: Single-vendor commercial open source. Single-vendor open source projects are open source projects dominated or owned by a single firm. This firm wants to earn direct revenue streams from the project and become or remain profitable based on these revenues. Thus, this area of open source economics is about growing new software firms. Examples are MySQL, SugarCRM, and Jaspersoft. I’ve explained how some of this works in the article “The Commercial Open Source Business Model.”
• Public welfare: Community open source. Community open source projects are open source projects that are run by a diverse community of stakeholders; unlike single-vendor commercial open source, there is no single dominant owner. Community open source creates public welfare in the form of high-quality software that people can use for free and that innovators can build on. A maturing community open source project typically joins or creates an open source foundation to become sustainable. Examples are Linux, Apache, and Gnome. I’ve explained some of the economics behind this in the paper “The Economic Case for Open Source Foundations.”
• Labor market: A New Engineering Career. Finally, open source is having a profound impact on the software developer labor market. On the one hand, the increasing commoditization and ease-of-access to open source software has made it much easier for a Sri Lankan 15yr-old kid to compete with a 40yr-old German engineer. On the other hand, open source offers a new career path that creates higher salaries and more job security on a global level. While I haven’t published about this yet, I have a good slide deck at hand to explain “A New Software Developer Career.”

You may wonder why I have not included, for example, providing paid-for services around community open source from the list above. The reason is that the economics behind such service businesses are fairly well understood. Thus, they are not particularly interesting from a research or public policy perspective. Similarly, I’ve dropped a few other phenomena from the list above because they don’t imply any significant change to how we live and work.

We live in exciting times with significant change and societal impact ahead of us. You can find my writings about this under publications as well as the abstracts (sometimes with slides) under presentations/current-talks. And of course, you are always welcome to drop me a question or comment on this blog or to email me about any concerns you might have.

I noticed an increasing interest into a general-interest talk of mine on how open source creates a new software developer career. This is not a rara (pep) talk but rather (I hope) an economically rational and sound analysis of changes in the software developer labor market brought about by open source. Here is the current abstract:

Open source creates a new career ladder for software developers, orthogonal to the traditional career in software firms. Advancing on this career ladder can win developers broader recognition for their work, increase their salaries, and improve their job security. Software developers, project and hiring managers, and personnel departments alike need to understand this new dimension in a developer’s career. This talk explains the career and discusses what skills a developer should possess or train to be successful.

I presented an early version of the talk at OSMB 2009 and I will present the next incarnation at CeBIT 2010’s open source forum this coming Tuesday. The preliminary finale for now will be a new release of the talk at the LinuxTag 2010 on June 10, 2010.

I intend to provide the slides for the talk under the Creative Commons license here after I finished the current revision. For now, if you have any thoughts on what open source means for software developer careers, please let me know!

Next three public talks on open source that I’ll be giving in Germany:

• Nuremberg, 25.02.10 – Talend Business Lunch, talk topic: Sustainability of Commercial Open Source
• Hannover, 02.03.10 – CeBIT Open Source Forum keynote: Open Source Software Developer Careers
• Erlangen, 30.04.10 – Tag der Informatik, Uni Erlangen-Nürnberg: Open Source and the Software End-Game

OOPSLA 2010 Research Papers

October 17 to 20
Reno/Tahoe Nevada, USA

www.splashcon.org

Paper Submission Deadline: March 25, 2010
Accept/Reject Notification Date: May 24, 2010

OOPSLA 2010 solicits research papers that present new research, report novel technical results, advance the state of the art, or discuss experience or experimentation. The scope of OOPSLA includes all aspects of programming languages and software engineering, broadly construed.

[Read more →]

I will be participating in the Computing Community Consortium’s workshop on the future of open source research at UC Irvine next month. The organizers asked participants to provide a short opinion on three research areas they feel warrant further research. I chose the following three general topics:

1. Quantitative Analyses of Actual Programmer Behavior
2. Improved Open Source Process and Tooling
3. Decision Models for Industry Participation in Community Open Source

You can find the full descriptions of these topics over at the website of the open source research group. For your convenience, I’ve also appended it as a PDF file.

Ike Nassi, an Executive Vice President and my former manager at SAP, writes in an email:

By accident, while reviewing a very old CACM paper “Programming Semantics for Multiprogrammed Computations” by Dennis and Van Horn from March 1966 (!) reprinted in the CACM 25th Anniversary issue (Volume 26, Issue 1 (Jan. 1983) Special 25th Anniversary Issue) I found a letter to the editor from Galler et al. dated 12-DEC-1968 (“Proprietary Packages: a Point of View”) in which the authors call for what is essentially open source:

“… In any case, we believe that the protected nature of such a proprietary package and the fact that it cannot be examined and evaluated impartially imply that descriptions and evaluations of it deserve to be related as sales literature and by nature are not appropriate for professional publications. When a scholarly report on such work is published in a professional publication, all supporting data (and programs) which are referenced in a professional publication should be freely available to all readers, as is usual with such a publication …”

There were follow up letters on the same theme. I wonder if this is the earliest reference to the concept.

Ike may well be right and this may be the earliest reference arguing against closed source, at least in research. Pointers for earlier references, if there are any, are welcome! And yes, open source licenses had still to be invented…

Authors: Dirk Riehle

Abstract: An open source foundation is a group of people and companies that has come together to jointly develop community open source software. Examples include the Apache Software Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, and the Gnome Foundation. There are many reasons why software development firms join and support a foundation. One common economic motivation is to save costs in the development of the software by spreading them over the participating parties. However, this is just the beginning. Beyond sharing costs, participating firms can increase their revenue through the provision and increased sale of complementary products. Also, by establishing a successful open source platform, software firms can compete more effectively across technology stacks and thereby increase their addressable market. Not to be neglected, community open source software is a common good, creating increased general welfare and hence goodwill for the involved companies.

Reference: IEEE Computer, vol. 43, no. 1 (January 2010). Page 86-90.

Available as HTML or as a PDF file.

The Chair for Economic Policy (Prof. Andreas Freytag) at the Friedrich-Schiller-University and the Max Planck Institute of Econonics, Jena, Germany, is organizing a workshop on “open source, innovation, and entrepreneurship.” It takes place next week, on Jan 14, 2010. It used to be a private, invitation-only workshop, but the organizers decided to open it up to the general public.

The workshop program (PDF) consists mainly of invited speakers from economics and related departments around the world; I guess it is more of a small symposium than a workshop in any way. I’ll be giving the closing keynote of the event talking about “why open source is hard for closed source vendors.”

Participation is free but you’ll have to cover your travel and accommodation costs, if any. If you are interested in participating, please contact Sebastian von Engelhardt.

2009 is coming to an end and so are my first four months as a professor. Time to take stock, if only shortly.

• The Open Source Research group posted a year-end summary for its first months
• There is initial sponsorship by Red Hat and Novell, demonstrating industry interest
• There was a fair amount of press around the professorship, showing general public interest

All in all, a good end to a year that most of us would prefer to forget. But as Matt Asay is suggesting, this may have been the year that Open Source made it big, so this is something to celebrate!

Stay tuned for upcoming research work on open source, using this blog’s RSS feed, or the OSR group’s home page and RSS feed, and of course the @dirkriehle and @osrgroup Twitter streams!

And of course a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2010 to everyone!

It is no big news that open source research has been growing strongly in recent years. However, the recent string of conference and workshop announcements is just amazing. Here is a short run-down of what reached me the last two weeks:

• 10.-12.02.2010: Workshop on the Future of Research on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)
• 08.05.2010: 2010 ICSE workshop on FLOSS
• 31.05.-01.06.2010: (F/L/)OSS 2010
• 01.-02.07.2010: Fourth F/LOSS Workshop

These are all international academic/research open source research events!