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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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, [...]

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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:

Quantitative Analyses of Actual Programmer Behavior
Improved Open Source Process [...]

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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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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 [...]

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