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) [...]

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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 [...]

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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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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) [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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Yesterday, SAP’s CTO Vishal Sikka called for a more open approach to the Java standardization process (JCP), asking SUN to stop ruling it with a heavy hand. Not surprisingly, he got some pushback using the argument that SAP isn’t one to talk about being more open, given its slow involvement with open source.
I don’t think [...]

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Yesterday, I participated in the local JUG’s discussion of the Sun acquisition by Oracle. Somewhat to my surprise, the general opinion was dismissive of OpenOffice’s future at Oracle. I haven’t spent much prior thought on this, but to me, OpenOffice seems to fit much better with Oracle than with Sun, at least on a strategic [...]

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It is difficult for many closed source software vendors to embrace open source. Why is this so? After all, over the last years we have come to understand the many business benefits of employing open source as part of a software vendor’s strategy toolbox. In this presentation, I make a first attempt at answering this [...]

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