Software Research and the Industry

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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Update 2010-05-28: The accepted papers are listed here now. If you are looking for a well-documented object-oriented framework to try your method, check-out this JUnit 3.8 documentation. There is more object-oriented software design case study documentation, of course. OOPSLA 2010 Research Papers October 17 to 20 Reno/Tahoe Nevada, USA www.splashcon.org Paper Submission Deadline: March 25, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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