Category Archives: Wikimedia

Curating, Preserving, and Showing Software at the Computer History Museum

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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

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Call for Papers: WikiSym 2011, the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

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The 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

October 3-5, 2011 | Mountain View, California

The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) is the premier conference on open collaboration and related technologies. In 2011, WikiSym celebrates its 7th year of scholarly, technical and community innovation in Mountain View, California at the Microsoft Research Campus in Silicon Valley.

Submissions are invited for the following categories:

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Revamping German Copyright Law #EIDG

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The German Enquete commission “Internet and Digital Society” is a multilateral commission instituted by the German parliament to discuss and make recommendations on, well, Internet and digital society. I’m a member of an expert advisory council for one of the parties involved in the commission. I received the following catalog of questions and thought I’d share the questions here and maybe we can have a good discussion. For international readers, it may be helpful to read Wikipedia on German copyright law. So, here are the questions.

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Open Source Business Research at OWF 2010

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Update, 2010-11-05: If you like this blog post, you might also like my artikel on the single-vendor commercial open source business model.

This afternoon, I’ll be presenting my thoughts on the current state of open source business research and future directions at the OpenWorldForum 2010 in Paris. I have summarized these thoughts in this blog entry, and they are aligned with the presentation I’ll be giving. I should add that business research here means academic business strategy and economics research, to the extent that a computer scientist can relate to it, and that most of my research is actually still traditional software engineering research.

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The 2010 AMOS Project (from OSR Group)

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The AMOS Project is the Open Source Research Group’s main class, teaching students agile methods and open source practices. It is also part of my incubator for startups. We just finished the first year. For your convenience, here are links to the most recent and relevant blog posts on the 2010 AMOS Project.

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MediaWiki and Commercial Open Source Innovation

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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 as the software running Wikipedia. It is also not an anti-commercial stance by the creators of MediaWiki (and its effective owner, the Wikimedia Foundation).

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WikiSym 2010 Program Announced!

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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 see you at WikiSym 2010, July 7-9, in Gdansk, Poland!

Linux-Tag Keynote Slides: A New Developer Career

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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 can win developers broader recognition for their work, increase their salaries, and improve their job security. Software developers, project and hiring managers, and personnel departments alike need to understand this new dimension in a developer’s career. This talk explains the career and discusses what skills a developer should possess or train to be successful.

Then the slides as PDF or below embedded from Slideshare.

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Open Source Software Research Inaugural Lecture at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

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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 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.

Community Open Source as the Raw Material of Computing Utility Providers

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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 consortia? It would put the very software infrastructure we take for granted under partisan control and there is no guarantee that those partisan or corporate interests would be in the interest of the public good.

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