Software Research and the Industry » From SDN

Bringing Wikipedia to Work: Open Collaboration within Corporations

Dirk Riehle — Wed, 28 May 2008 04:30:46 +0000

This upcoming Wikimania 2008 tutorial discusses the three principles of “open collaboration” which I believe are underlying wikis, open source, and other forms of peer production. It is a follow-up to last year’s tutorial about open collaboration at Wikimania 2007.

If the slideshow doesn’t play, please use the PDF file download below.

Reference: Dirk Riehle. “Bringing Wikipedia to Work: Open Collaboration in Corporations.” In Proceedings of Wikimania 2008, forthcoming.

Also available as a PDF file.

SDN: Is Open Source Competing Unfairly?

Dirk Riehle — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:46:07 +0000

Commercial open source firms go to market trying to create an “unfair” competitive advantage that lets them win customers more easily than their competitors. So do most other companies. Commercial open source firms do this by bypassing the traditional purchasing process by getting their software into customer companies for free, before the customers even know they will need the software. But is an employee’s decision to install a piece of open source software a good decision for the company? After all, every software locks in its users, whether open source or not.

SDN: Selling Services for Stock Open Source Components…

Dirk Riehle — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:29:38 +0000

[...] There is much less demand for open source services than one might have expected. But it is not only the demand-side. The supply of such services is also problematic. Why? Because it is a hard business to be in. Why that? Because there are no juicy profit margins. Now, that needs some explanation.

SDN: Is there Money in Open Source Services?

Dirk Riehle — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:23:22 +0000

IDC’s Matt Lawton recently released a new report about open source adoption:

“However, project vendors, project partners, and vendor partners need to step up and provide support and attendant services in order to move the adoption of OSS from early adopters to the mainstream. Only 12% of all projects are supported by a commercial software vendor, and, incredibly, less than 1% of the projects have attendant services sourced from service providers.” [...]

Wow! Open source is in the enterprise, and only 1% of those off-the-shelf software components have attendant services for them?