Last Friday, I presented my inaugural lecture at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, as is customary for a new professor. My topic was open source software research, and I’m making the slides available under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. The talk took place on April 30th, 2010, during FAU’s 2010 Tag der Informatik (Day of Computer Science). Here is the abstract of the 45min talk:

Open source software has become ubiquitous. In this talk, I lay out a research agenda for my group. By reviewing prior work, I show that open source has not only become ubiquitous but also economically sustainable. I also show what further open source economics work needs to be done. Changing gears, I then address the software engineering research I see ahead for open source. Thanks to the public nature of open source, most relevant project information is easily accessible. I expect this to lead software engineering research to a golden age of empirically founded insights and conclusions. Beyond analysis, I address how our research will innovate new tools and practices using a software forge.

The talk slides are available as a PDF file and are licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.