Software Research and the Industry

You may be surprised to hear that the dominant public Internet wiki engine, MediaWiki, only plays a minor role in the enterprise. Within the corporate firewalls, TWiki, Confluence, DokuWiki, TikiWiki, and others are running the show. Why is that? It is certainly not the lack of commercial customer interest in MediaWiki, which everyone already knows [...]

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The WikiSym 2010 program has been announced. Keynotes are by Cliff Lampe and Andrew Lih, and the program is full of research talks, workshops, posters, and demos. And, of course, there is a continuous track of open space available for everyone to discuss their wiki and open collaboration interests and issues. Check it out! And [...]

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I just finished my Linux-Tag 2010 keynote and so I’m providing the talk slides here under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. First title and abstract: Open Source: A New Developer Career Open source creates a new career ladder for software developers, orthogonal to the traditional career in software firms. Advancing on this career ladder [...]

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Over at the OSR Group’s website we just announced that I have joined the scientific advisory board of OpenSAGA, a soon to be released open source infrastructure project for eGovernment services. (SAGA is German for Standards and Architectures for eGovernment Applications so it is somewhat Germany centric.) OpenSAGA was started by one company, Quinscape GmbH, [...]

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These are the next three public open source (research) talks I’ll be doing: 2010-04-25: “Open Source Economics” at the 2010 NPFOSST workshop, KACST, Saudia Arabia. 2010-04-30: “Open Source Software Research” at the 2010 Erlanger Informatik-Tag, Erlangen, Germany. (In German.) 2010-05-05: “Why Open Source is Hard for Closed Source Vendors” at JAX 2010, Mainz, Germany.

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I just finished listening to Marten Mickos at PARC Forum on open source businesses. Below please find my list of key statements from this talk. Most are well-known, some remain controversial, however, as a researcher it is good to be able to pinpoint such statements.

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It’s April 2nd, so the Apache Software Foundation’s 2010 April Fools’ joke is over. Here is why I liked it a lot. It represents a hypothetical: What if the ASF and its projects could be bought? Or, if not bought, then put under control or strong influence of corporate interests like in traditional open source [...]

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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) [...]

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Update, 2010-03-19: Linux Magazin made the talk video available. Their data shows that more than 10,000 people watched it live! 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 [...]

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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

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