Author Archives: Dirk Riehle

Publishers, E-Books, and DRM

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2012-02-18: Updated the post with translations from the original letter.

I’m an Addison-Wesley author and just received a letter from Pearson, the owner of Addison-Wesley, informing me about their thoughts and steps towards e-books and the digital age. The letter is written as an open letter with no apparent secrets, so I’m making it available here for anyone interested to read and to comment on it.

In general, I have sympathies with companies trying to sustain their revenue streams. I do expect them, however, to understand that change is inevitable and to flexibly react to and to lead that change for their customers’ sake and not just their shareholders’ sake. As an author, I’m naturally in a similar or at least related situation.

The PDF is marked up with numbers. The following list relates to what the (German) letter says on the respective issues:

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Call for Papers: WikiSym 2012

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8th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

August 27-29, 2012 | Linz, Austria

The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) is the premier conference on open collaboration and related technologies. In 2012, WikiSym celebrates its 8th year of scholarly, technical and community innovation in Linz, Austria.  We are excited this year to be collocated with Ars Electronica, the premier digital art and science meeting that attracts over 35,000 attendees per year.

Submissions are invited for the following categories:

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Why Open Source is Good for German Software Businesses

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I’m on the expert advisory committee of one of the German parties for the current “Internet Enquette”, a commission tasked by the German parliament with suggesting future directions for Germany’s stance toward the Internet and everything digital. At a meeting this evening, a lobbyist confided in me: “Open source is bad for German software vendors!” I gasped. He couldn’t be further from the truth. If this was mechanical engineering or electrical engineering, he’d be right. ME? EE? Germany is top. Software? Not so. Beyond a few selected highlights, Germany is an also-ran internationally. When it comes to software product businesses, German companies would benefit significantly if the dice would be rolled again. Anything that upsets the current order can only be an improvement over the current state of affairs. Open source does just that. More power to open source business models!

Do Engineering Researchers Care About Truth?

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So ICSE, the top software engineering conference, rejected our paper, again. The reviewers were actually quite positive: high-quality work, little or no flaws, interesting. One of the reviewers found the paper’s results surprising, asked for more details, and suggested new research directions. The final conclusion of both reviews, however, was the same: The work has no merit because it only explains the world, it does not improve it.

Our paper provides a high-quality model of a key aspect of programming behavior in open source, basically the modeling behind this earlier empirical paper. As such, it is a descriptive empirical paper. It takes a large amount of data and provides an analytically closed model of the data so that we can explain or predict the future (better). That’s pretty standard operating procedure in most of natural and social sciences.

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Developer Belief vs. Reality: The Case of the Commit Size Distribution

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Abstract: The design of software development tools follows from what the developers of such tools believe is true about software development. A key aspect of such beliefs is the size of code contributions (commits) to a software project. In this paper, we show that what tool developers think is true about the size of code contributions is different by more than an order of magnitude from reality. We present this reality, called the commit size distribution, for a large sample of open source and selected closed source projects. We suggest that these new empirical insights will help improve software development tools by aligning underlying design assumptions closer with reality.

Reference: Dirk Riehle, Carsten Kolassa, Michel A. Salim. “Developer Belief vs. Reality: The Case of the Commit Size Distribution.” In Proceedings of Software Engineering 2012 (SE ’12). Springer Verlag, 2012.

The paper is available as a PDF file. The survey used in the paper is also available as a PDF file.

Business Risks and Governance of Open Source in Software Products (in German)

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Titel: Geschäftsrisiken und Governance von Open-Source in Softwareprodukten

Zusammenfassung: In fast jedem Softwareprodukt, auch in großer Standardsoftware, sind heute Open-Source-Komponenten enthalten. Die Hersteller dieser Software müssen die Geschäftsrisiken, die mit der Integration von Open-Source-Software in kommerzielle Produkte verbunden sind, verstehen und vernünftig managen. Dieser Artikel zeigt ein Modell verschiedener rechtlicher, technischer und sozialer Risiken auf, die durch unkontrollierten Einsatz von Open-Source-Software entstehen und erläutert ausgewählte Erfolgsmethoden der Open-Source-Governance, die von führenden Firmen angewandt werden. Das Modell ist das Analyseergebnis von fünf mit großen deutschen Softwareherstellern geführten Interviews sowie weiterer Literaturrecherche.

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Call for Papers: OSS 2012

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For your convenience, the OSS 2012 call for papers (I’m on the program committee).

THE 8th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS

Hammamet, Tunisia, 10-13 September 2012

Scope of OSS 2012

Over the past two decades, Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) has introduced new successful models for creating, distributing, acquiring and using software and software-based services. Inspired by the success of FLOSS, other forms of open initiatives have been gaining momentum. Open source systems (OSS) now extend beyond software to include open access, open documents, open science, open education, open government, open cloud, open hardware, open artworks and museum exhibits, open innovation and more. On the one hand, the openness movement has created new kinds of opportunities such as the emergence of new business models, knowledge exchange mechanisms, and collective development approaches. On the other hand, the movement has introduced new kinds of challenges, especially as different problem domains embrace openness as a pervasive problem solving strategy. OSS can be complex yet widespread and often cross-cultural. Consequently, they require an interdisciplinary understanding of their technical, economic, legal and socio-cultural dynamics.

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Call for Papers: ECOOP 2012

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For your convenience, the ECOOP 2012 call for papers (I’m on the program committee).

Call for Papers 征稿启事

The European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) is the premium international conference covering all areas of object technology and related software development technologies. ECOOP 2012 will take place from 11-16 June, 2012 in Beijing, China — only the second time ECOOP has been held outside Europe. ECOOP 2012 embraces a broad range of topics related to object-orientation, including:

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