I was revising my talk on “Inner Source” when it occurred to me that it might be fun to review the changes to the sf.net (Sourceforge) homepage. Please find my collection of screenshots below. I only started saving them in 2007 so pointers to more and older screenshots are welcome! (In particular if they come with a CC license so that I can use them in talks, attribution is a given. I trust that Geek.net does not object…) Thanks!
Every year, I teach the AMOS class, a lab course on “Agile Methods and Open Source” that combines lectures with a real software project that ideally turns into a startup (see the AMOS Project concept, in German). To explain open source, I have to introduce students to intellectual property rights, of which most have been blissfully unaware of until then. Nothing teaches concepts better than a colorful story, and so I have been using the IP strategies around Java to make this dry topic come alive. For fun, comments, and corrections, I’m providing the short version of my talk below, including commentary. (You can also download a PDF version of the talk, with our without notes, licensed as CC-BY 3.0. If you find this useful for teaching, please tell me.) Students at this point have a basic working understanding of intellectual property and exclusion rights. Please let me know what you think! Finally, IANAL.
Java is an important technology powering the modern web and in particular enterprise applications. It has a checkered intellectual property history, and with the recent acquisition of Sun, the Java creator and owner, by Oracle, things only stand to heat up. This slide set discusses some of the more interesting issues around Java intellectual property and its strategic use in business.
Modern organizations rely on complex configurations of distributed IT systems that implement key business processes, provide databases, data warehousing, and business intelligence. The current business environment requires organizations to comply with a range of externally defined regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and BASEL II.
Organizations need to be increasingly agile, robust, and be able to react to complex events, possibly in terms of dynamic reconfiguration.
Open source is not only software, but also an approach to software development. The public nature of open source projects lets us show how open source software development scales to the largest project sizes. The following figure illustrates the scalability of open source software development. I call it the big bang of open source.
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.
Seit ein paar Monaten ist die neue Ausgabe des Entwurfsmusterbuchs verfügbar. Dies ist meine Übersetzung des Klassikers “Design Patterns” von Erich Gamma et al. aus dem Amerikanischen. Mit der neuen Ausgabe kommen einige Neuerungen und Änderungen. An erster Stelle zu nennen wäre der neue Umschlag:
Erster Vorschlag für den Umschlag der neuen Ausgabe
Der tatsächliche Inhalt der Sprechblase in der endgültigen veröffentlichten Fassung ist ein anderer und lautet: “We present you the book that changed software design.” Da die Viererbande (Gang-of-four) noch auf ein Nachfolgebuch mit weiteren Mustern hofft, habe ich Addison-Wesley’s ursprünglichen Vorschlag entsprechend geändert.
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