Software Research and the Industry

You may be surprised to hear that the dominant public Internet wiki engine, MediaWiki, only plays a minor role in the enterprise. Within the corporate firewalls, TWiki, Confluence, DokuWiki, TikiWiki, and others are running the show. Why is that? It is certainly not the lack of commercial customer interest in MediaWiki, which everyone already knows [...]

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The WikiSym 2010 program has been announced. Keynotes are by Cliff Lampe and Andrew Lih, and the program is full of research talks, workshops, posters, and demos. And, of course, there is a continuous track of open space available for everyone to discuss their wiki and open collaboration interests and issues. Check it out! And [...]

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I just finished my Linux-Tag 2010 keynote and so I’m providing the talk slides here under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. First title and abstract: Open Source: A New Developer Career Open source creates a new career ladder for software developers, orthogonal to the traditional career in software firms. Advancing on this career ladder [...]

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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 [...]

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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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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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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 [...]

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This morning, I read that the main Swedish research funding agency has decided to enforce open access to research results of projects it funds. This is a big deal for Swedish researchers relying on these funds: The status of a researcher is determined by the prestige of the journals in which they publish (and how [...]

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We had a busy first week over at the website of the Open Source Research group: we announced several open positions for Ph.D. studies in open source, we were featured in the newsletter of the Open Source Business Foundation, we launched a survey on the “best” literature of agile methods and open source, and we [...]

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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 [...]

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