Next three public talks on open source that I’ll be giving in Germany:
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 to the general public.
The workshop program (PDF) consists mainly of invited speakers from economics and related departments around the world; I guess it is more of a small symposium than a workshop in any way. I’ll be giving the closing keynote of the event talking about “why open source is hard for closed source vendors.”
Participation is free but you’ll have to cover your travel and accommodation costs, if any. If you are interested in participating, please contact Sebastian von Engelhardt.
Here the slides for my OOPSLA Onward! 2009 talk on “Design Pattern Density Defined.” First the abstract:
Design pattern density is a metric that measures how much of an object-oriented design can be understood and represented as instances of design patterns. Expert developers have long believed that a high design pattern density implies a high maturity of the design under inspection. This paper presents a quantifiable and observable definition of this metric. The metric is illustrated and qualitatively validated using four real-world case studies. We present several hypotheses of the metric’s meaning and their implications, including the one about design maturity. We propose that the design pattern density of a maturing framework has a fixed point and we show that if software design patterns make learning frameworks easier, a framework’s design pattern density is a measure of how much easier it will become.
The talk slides are available as a PDF file and are licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
For a discussion of the talk’s contents I recommend reading the original article.
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 question (and also include a few remedies). In a nutshell,
open source is hard for closed source vendors, (1) because they have a different risk/reward profile than startups and have a higher fear around legal uncertainties, (2) because they would have to undergo substantial and painful organizational change, easily involving lay-offs, and (3) because current sales incentives are not set up to support cross-selling open source.
This presentation is an alpha release, which is to say, I doubt I’ve nailed it all. Please tell me what you think I’ve missed or where you dis/agree with my thoughts! Because of this, I maintain full copyright of the presentation. Later revisions will hopefully include your feedback (and give proper credits) and will be released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
The presentation is available as a PDF file.
For my AMCIS 2009 talk on the single-vendor commercial open source business model, first the abstract, then the slides:
Commercial open source software projects are open source software projects that are owned by a single firm that derives a direct and significant revenue stream from the software. Commercial open source at first glance represents an economic paradox: How can a firm earn money if it is making its product available for free as open source? This paper presents the core properties of commercial open source business models and discusses how they work… [more]
The talk slides are available as a PDF file and are licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
For a discussion of the talk’s contents I recommend reading the original article.
A couple of weeks ago, Oliver Günther and I reported about the results of the Micro-Blogging in the Enterprise Focus Groups we had undertaken in December 2008. The report was an internal talk at SAP Labs LLC in Palo Alto and drew a record audience. I’m glad to report that we can publish the slides for this talk. Mark Finnern had previously blogged about it. If you are interested in this work, a more comprehensive presentation can be found in our upcoming AMCIS paper on micro-blogging adoption in the enterprise.
You may have noticed our work on improving corporate software development at SAP using an in-house software forge. The main benefit is in transferring open source best practices to our software development processes. At an upcoming industry conference presentation I’ll be talking about some of the lessons we learned. Here is the abstract of the talk:
Abstract: A software forge is a tools platform for collaborative software development, similar to integrated CASE environments. Unlike CASE tools software forges have been designed for the software development practices of the open source community. Open source software projects succeed where waterfall and agile methods fail: They can cope with changing requirements and they can scale to large project sizes. Thus, corporate software development can learn from open source best practices. In this presentation, I discuss our experiences with using a software forge to bring open source best practices into SAP. We present the design principles and benefits of a firm-internal software forge, and we present a case study of how one project inside SAP benefited significantly from being on the forge.
Reference: Dirk Riehle. “Bringing Open Source Best Practices into Corporations Using a Software Forge.” Talk at SEACON 2009. Hamburg, Germany: 2009.
I’ll be giving a talk at the Open Source Business Conference 2009 in San Francisco on March 24, 2009. The talk will present an easily accessible summary of our data-driven analytical work on how open source software development works. Here is the abstract:
For the first time in the history of software engineering, we can both broadly and deeply analyze the behavior and dynamics of software development projects. This has become possible because of open source, which is publicly developed software. In this presentation, I will discuss our recent findings about open source software, its development process, and programmer behavior. I also discuss the challenges we encountered when quantitatively mining software repositories for such insights.
Reference: Talk at OSBC 2009. San Francisco, CA: 2009.
Available as a PDF file.
…is not nearly as sexy a title for an industry talk as is “Open Source Hacker Careers” so it had to go. The result you can observe at the 2009 Open Source Meets Business conference in Nuremberg, Germany, on January 28th, 2009, when I will be giving a talk (almost) so named.
Open Source Software Developer Careers
Open source is changing how software is built and how money is made. Open source also defines a new developer career that is independent of the traditional career within companies. This talk discusses this new career and argues that it creates economic value for some while it makes life harder for others. Suggesting that such a career is worthwhile, the talk then discusses key skills that a developer should possess or train in order to be successful in open source projects.
Wikipedia is the free online encyclopedia that has taken the Internet by storm. It is written and administered solely by volunteers. How exactly did this come about and how does it work? Can it keep working? And maybe more importantly, can you transfer its practices to the workplace to achieve similar levels of dedication and quality of work? In this presentation I describe the structure, processes and governance of Wikipedia and discuss how some of its practices can be transferred to the corporate context.
This presentation represents the next step in the evolution of two Wikimania tutorials/workshops, see Presentations/Tutorials. If the slideshow doesn’t play, please use the PDF file download below.
Reference: Dirk Riehle. “Learning from Wikipedia: Open Collaboration within Corporations.” Invited talk at Talk the Future 2008. Krems, Austria: 2008.
The slides are available as a PDF file.