Category Archives: Wikimedia

Teaching Note for Case "User-Generated Content Systems at Intuit(A)" E-381(A)

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Abstract: This is a teaching note for the free case “User-Generated Content Systems at Intuit(A)”, E-381(A), from the Stanford Free Case collection available at ECCH. The original case is a product management case in which Intuit, maker of consumer and small business financial software, faces the decision to “go social or not” for user help in its tax preparation software. The original case discusses the pros and cons of such a disruptive innovation. This teaching note provides pertinent questions to ask your students as well as my summary answers to these questions. I could not find an original teaching note hence I wrote this one. This is my first such note so any suggestions for improvement are welcome. The note is licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0; feel free to use it in your own teaching. The note’s home is my website. For attribution, please link to it.

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The Java IP Story

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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, 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.

  1. What is Java?
  2. Short Java IP Story Time-Line
  3. Three Substories
  4. Java’s Challenge to the Windows Platform
  5. Microsoft and Java
  6. The OpenJDK Strategy (Open Core Model)
  7. Certification of Compatible Implementations
  8. Threats to Commercial Revenue
  9. Main Tools to Curtail “Competitors”
  10. Problems for Alternative Implementations
  11. Problems for OpenJDK Forks
  12. Thank you! and References

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The Open Source Big Bang

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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.

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The Parser that Cracked the MediaWiki Code

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I am happy to announce that we finally open sourced the Sweble Wikitext parser. You can find the announcement on the OSR Group blog or directly on the Sweble project site. This is the work of Hannes Dohrn, my first Ph.D. student, who I hired in 2009 to implement a Wikitext parser.

So what about this “cracking the MediaWiki code”?

Wikipedia aims to bring the (encyclopedic) knowledge of the world to all of us, for free. While already ten years old, the Wikipedia community is just getting started, and we have barely seen the tip of the iceberg, there is so much more to come. All that wonderful content is being written by volunteers using a (seemingly) simple language called Wikitext (the stuff you type in once you click on edit). Until today, Wikitext had been poorly defined.

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Open Commons Region Linz is Starting

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The region of and around Linz, Austria, has declared itself the Open Commons Region Linz. The opening festivities, including talks, free-of-charge, will take place on April 11th, 2011, in Linz (naturally). Read more about it on the blog of the Open Commons Region Linz! I’m a member of the academic advisory council of the Open Commons Region Linz and applaud and support the effort. I’m also happy to say that it will me bring to Linz in person once in a while.

Upcoming Talk, Tsinghua University: Open Source Research

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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

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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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