I’ll be presenting the Open Source Research talk repeatedly over the next few months. The next three instances are in China, specifically:
After that it’s back to Germany.
| 报告题目 | Open Source Research |
| 报告人 | Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle, University of Erlangen, Germany |
| 时间 | 2011年03月17日（周一） 10:00am-noon |
| 地点 | FIT大楼 4-302 |
Just before my inaugural lecture at University of Erlangen, a broad panel of scientists was debating the merits of computer games. Except for a computer games researcher and a games professional, all participants thought that computer games are of no particular interest. When I asked: “But isn’t there anything to learn from computer games?” I got a full rebuke by the M.D. on the panel: “No, there is no recognizable value whatsoever.”
Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global impact on the way organisations and individuals create, distribute, acquire and use software and software-based services. OSS has challenged the conventional wisdom of the software engineering and software business communities, has been instrumental for educators and researchers, and has become an important aspect of e-government and information society initiatives. OSS is a complex phenomenon and requires a interdisciplinary understanding of its engineering, technical, economic, legal and socio-cultural dynamics.
Last Saturday I visited the Computer History Museum’s new exhibition “R|Evolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing”. The exhibition is fantastic, and they’ve come a long way from the early days of their “visible storage” exhibition. If you live in or visit the Silicon Valley, I highly recommend you pay it a visit.
That said, every time I visit the museum, I ask about the state of curating, preserving, and showing not only hardware, but also software. Like most exhibitions, the R|Evolution exhibition focusses on physical objects and complements them with textual explanations on plates as well as videos. Software is being discussed in the Software Theatre and in some smaller videos. However, these videos are about software and programming in general, not about actual software artifacts. Software is mostly shown through physical objects, i.e. the boxes they came in as packaged software.
Packaged Software Box Arc
Last Saturday I visited the “R|Evolution” exhibition at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum (more on that later). One reason why I went there was to see the “community wall” of plaques sponsored by small-time donors. I had sponsored one and my saying on it was:
In honor of Peter Naur: To program is to learn.
I’m sure Peter Naur is being honored by the CHM elsewhere and in a more appropriate style than my whimsical plaque, but I wanted to use this blog post to explain the plaque and the meaning of the saying on it.
Like every non-profit, the CHM is always looking for support and donations, and so they had called for financial support in late 2009 and promised a plaque on a community wall as a way of saying thanks for the support.
Community wall (of small-time donors) at the CHM, Feb 2011
Abstract: Given the increasing interest in using social software for company-internal communication and collaboration, this paper examines drivers and inhibitors of micro-blogging adoption at the workplace. While nearly one in two companies is currently planning to introduce social software, there is no empirically validated research on employees’ adoption. In this paper, we build on previous focus group results and test our research model in an empirical study using Structural Equation Modeling. Based on our findings, we derive recommendations on how to foster adoption. We suggest that micro-blogging should be presented to employees as an efficient means of communication, personal brand building, and knowledge management. In order to particularly promote content contribution, privacy concerns should be eased by setting clear rules on who has access to postings and for how long they will be archived.
Reference: Valentin Schöndienst, Hanna Krasnova, Oliver Günther, and Dirk Riehle. “Micro-Blogging Adoption in the Enterprise: An Empirical Analysis.” In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI 2011). Page 931-940.
The paper is available in PDF form. You may also like the prior paper “Modeling Micro-Blogging Adoption in the Enterprise” as well as my “patterns of effective tweeting”.
Update 2012-01-28: Springer changed the citation. The reference below reflects this.
Springer just republished our 2009 article on how vendor-owned open source works, again. Here is the abstract:
Abstract: Single-vendor 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. Single-vendor 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 single-vendor open source business models and discusses how they work. Using a single-vendor open source approach, firms can get to market faster with a superior product at lower cost than possible for traditional competitors. The paper shows how these benefits accrue from an engaged and self-supporting user community. Lacking any prior comprehensive reference, this paper is based on an analysis of public statements by practitioners of single-vendor open source. It forges the various anecdotes into a coherent description of revenue generation strategies and relevant business functions.
Reference: Dirk Riehle. “The Single-Vendor Commercial Open Source Business Model.” Information Systems and e-Business Management vol. 10, no. 1. Springer Verlag, 2012. Page 5-17.
You can read it online, download a PDF, or use the Springer site.
Following up on my Lisog talk earlier this month, I was asked to write up the talk’s content. So here we go, my analysis of what commercial open source firms do to manage or steer open source projects they depend on.
Abstract: Most commercial software today depends on open source software. The commercial software might be using an underlying open source platform, or it might be incorporating open source components, or it might be provided as a commercial open source product itself. Whichever the case, the software firm behind the commercial software needs to ensure that its interests are met by the open source software projects it depends on. This article shows how commercial software firms manage or steer open source software projects to meet their business needs.
A recent article in the CACM complained about the dominance of reductionists’ views in computer science research.
“We are sorry to inform you that your paper has been rejected, due to the lack of empirical evidence supporting it.” [1]