From what I can tell, companies are shying away from bringing commercial innovation and investment to MediaWiki because of the uncertainty around its intellectual property. I recently talked with a consulting firm that intends to provide services and extensions to MediaWiki. Extension is the MediaWiki term for plug-in, that is program code separate from the main project code but that is executed together with it. When they asked their lawyers whether they could create and sell proprietary extensions to MediaWiki they received a lawyerly “maybe”, which left them wondering whether it would be wise to bank on MediaWiki.

MediaWiki uses the GPLv2 (and later) license family. Whether the GPL applies to extensions has been answered by the community a couple of times with a not-so-resounding “probably not”. Thus, software firms are somewhat left guessing as to the legal situation and the intentions of the MediaWiki development community. Being able to decide on your own when you want to open source or keep something proprietary, however, is key to engaging software firms and creating commercial investment and innovation.

At WikiSym 2010 I talked to a lot of Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) folks. The WMF operates Wikipedia and is the caretaker of MediaWiki. From these discussions I know that the WMF guys want commercial innovation around MediaWiki and are not at all fundamentalists about open-sourcing everything that touches MediaWiki. So here is what I think needs to happen if we want to see MediaWiki benefit from commercial innovation and have it make inroads into the enterprise:

• Exception clause. There must be legal certainty as to whether extensions/plugins can be kept proprietary. The way to go is a clearly defined exception clause to the GPL that covers extensions. It must be safe for a firm to innovate and keep the fruits of their labor for a while. I don’t worry about not sharing: In most cases, competitors and community will catch-up fast enough so that nobody will keep software proprietary for too long.
• Trademarks and other IP. The term “MediaWiki” is important from a marketing perspective due to spill-over effects from Wikipedia. Thus it must be crystal-clear under what circumstances a software firm can use this term in its marketing outreach. The usual solution is to create a foundation, say, the MediaWiki Foundation, which becomes the caretaker of the trademark and other IP, and in which commercial entities can have a stake. [1]

The second bullet item suggests the creation of a MediaWiki Foundation. One may wonder whether the Wikimedia Foundation can play this role. I wouldn’t advise this, because conflict of interest resolution would be difficult in such a setup. The primary mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to steer and operate a specific set of services, and MediaWiki is just the software being used for it. If firms would always fear having to bow to WMF interests when the going gets tough, they’d stay away from the get-go, as they are doing today.

Another alternative would be to transfer rights to a software foundation like the Free Software Foundation (due to GPL) or maybe the Apache Software Foundation if folks were to consider a license change. These foundations are experienced in handling conflicts and might be good caretakers. On the other hand, as the Drupal Foundation shows by comparison, MediaWiki may well be important enough to warrant its own foundation.

[1] Eugene Kim pointed out to me the Wikimedia Foundation trademark policy, which covers WMF trademarks. MediaWiki seems to play only a minor role only, though.

Technical/Research Track

ICSE is the premier forum for researchers to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, results, experiences and concerns in the field of software engineering.

The ICSE 2011 theme of Software by Design reflects the widely-held view that the most important ingredient in ensuring a software system’s long-term success is its design. While other concepts, concerns, activities, artifacts, and processes are important to the success of a software engineering project, it is the quality of a system’s design that provides the critical ingredient. Highlighting design as the conference’s theme is meant to focus attention upon design’s centrality, to encourage reflection on design experience, to inspire new designers, and to encourage development of new design techniques.

We invite high quality submissions of technical / research papers describing original and unpublished results of theoretical, empirical, conceptual, and experimental software engineering research. Incremental improvements over previously published work should have been evaluated through systematic, comparative, empirical, or experimental evaluation. Submissions of papers describing groundbreaking approaches to emerging problems will be considered based on timeliness and potential impact.

Conference Topics

Conference topics of interest for ICSE include, but are not limited to:

• Agile software development
• AI- and knowledge-based software engineering
• Aspect–orientation and feature interaction
• Computer supported cooperative work
• Empirical software engineering
• End user software engineering
• Engineering for mobile, ubiquitous, and pervasive software
• Engineering of distributed/parallel software systems
• Engineering of embedded and real–time software
• Engineering secure software
• Human–computer interaction
• Internet and information systems development
• Patterns and frameworks
• Program comprehension and visualization
• Programming languages
• Reverse engineering and maintenance
• Software architecture and design
• Software components and reuse
• Software configuration management and deployment
• Software dependability, safety and reliability
• Software economics and metrics
• Software policy and ethics
• Software processes and workflows
• Software requirements engineering
• Software testing and analysis
• Software tools and development environments
• Theory and formal methods

How to Submit

Please read all of these instructions prior to submitting your paper.

Research papers should describe innovative and significant original research relevant to ICSE as described above. Papers submitted for consideration should not have been published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere during the duration of consideration. ACM plagiarism policies and procedures shall be followed for cases of double submission.

All papers must conform at time of submission to the ICSE 2011 Format and Submission Guidelines, and must not exceed 10 pages, including all text, references, appendices and figures. All submissions must be in English. Submissions must be in PDF format.

Submissions that do not comply with the foregoing instructions will be desk rejected without review.

Note: camera–ready copy will use the same format and length limits required of submissions, and thus your submission should reflect the form that you anticipate your camera–ready copy will take.

Review and Evaluation Criteria

Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the Program Committee. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of originality, importance of contribution, soundness, evaluation, quality of presentation, and appropriate comparison to related work. The program committee as a whole will make final decisions about which submissions to accept for presentation at the conference.

Acceptance

Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will be asked to complete an ACM Copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing their camera ready versions. At least one author of each paper is expected to present the results at the ICSE 2011 conference. All accepted contributions will be published in the conference electronic proceedings which will also be available as printed proceedings.

Important Dates

• Submission Due Date: Friday, August 20, 2010
• Notification Date: Friday, November 19, 2010
• Camera-Ready Date: Friday, February 11, 2011

Mentoring Program

This program enables prospective submitters to the research/technical track to gain advice on the structure and content of a proposed submission. This program is available to prospective submitters who have not yet published a research/technical track paper at ICSE. Available now through July 1, 2010. See the Mentoring Program page for more information.

Download

ICSE 2011 Call for Papers: Technical/Research Track (3MB Adobe PDF)

Program Co-Chairs

Harald Gall
University of Zurich, Switzerland
Switzerland

Nenad Medvidović
University of Southern California
United States of America

Program Committee

Abstract: Open Source bezeichnet nicht nur eine Kategorie von Software, sondern auch einen Ansatz der Softwareentwicklung, welcher sich von plan-getriebenen und agilen Methoden der Softwareentwicklung unterscheidet. Zunehmend betrachtet die Softwareindustrie zudem Open Source als Geschäftsmodell. Dieser Vortrag erläutert an zum Teil überraschenden Beispielen, wie die Open-Source-Softwareentwicklung funktioniert und wie sie sich von traditionellen Methoden der Softwareentwicklung unterscheidet. Über die konkreten Fragen der Softwaretechnik hinaus zeigt der Vortrag dann anhand von Geschäftsmodellen auf, warum Open Source wirtschaftlich nachhaltig ist.

Location: University of Dortmund, 13. Tag der Informatik, 2010-07-02, 14:30 Uhr, Invited Lecture.

The Paper & Short Paper Deadline is July 3.

ACM CHIMIT ’10

Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology

November 12-13, 2010, San Jose, CA (co-located with USENIX LISA in San Jose)

Since 2007, CHIMIT has been the leading forum for discussing topics on IT management with a focus on people, business, and technology. At CHIMIT, researchers and practitioners share issues, solutions, and research drawing upon fields such as human-computer interaction, human factors, collaborative work, computer systems, and management and service sciences to address cognitive, social, and technical issues in managing the increasing complexity of modern Information Technology (IT) systems.

Information Technology (IT) is central to modern life. From our homes to our largest enterprises, we are surrounded by software and hardware components that support our work and personal lives: wireless access points, network routers, firewalls, virus scanners, databases, web servers, storage and backup systems, etc. These components exist to permit us to do other things, e.g., manage inventory, communicate with friends or customers, sell products through websites, yet all too often managing the underlying IT infrastructure takes time and resources away from the real work at hand. IT systems have grown increasingly complex over the years, and the cost for keeping the infrastructure running is now a significant burden. We are at a turning point where further advances in technology and business efficiency and growth require fundamentally new approaches to IT system design, management, and services.

CHIMIT is an ACM-sponsored conference, and accepted Paper and Short Paper submissions will be archived in the ACM Digital Library. Topics include (but are not limited to):

• User Studies of IT infrastructure management in context, exposing user needs, pain points, work practices, and examples of both successful and unsuccessful work.
• Design – approaches to bring about improved, human-centered IT systems.
• Experimental Studies on the usage of new or existing IT systems.
• Tools and Techniques for improved administration, e.g., visualizations of system behavior, or collaborative interfaces.
• Automation approaches to reduce administration workload or improve productivity.
• Computer supported cooperative work – how do those who manage an organization’s IT interact with the users they support, their technical community, and other stakeholders?
• Organizational Knowledge – how can shared knowledge improve IT management.
• Processes and Practices – examples of best practices and improved processes in IT management.
• New Technologies – how will the changing technological landscape (e.g., Cloud Computing, pervasive mobile devices, etc.) affect IT management?
• IT Beyond the Enterprise – what are the implications now that we’re doing backups, network configuration, etc. in the home?

Submission Dates

• July 3, 2010: Papers and Short Papers Due
• August 7, 2010: Panels and Courses Due
• September 17, 2010: Selections announced
• September 24, 2010: Posters Due
• October 1, 2010: Poster selections announced

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.

Reference: Dirk Riehle. “Open Source: A New Developer Career.” Keynote at Linux-Tag 2010. Berlin, Germany: 2010. Available under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

Special Track on Modularity Visions

Part of the Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) 2011 conference, March 21-25, 2001, in Porto de Galhinas, Pernambuco, Brazil.

Important Dates

Rolling submission opens: Tuesday, June 15th 2010 (23:59 Samoan time)
Rolling submission closes: Monday, August 30th, 2010 (23:59 Samoan time)
Acceptance notification: Within 6 weeks of submission

Final submission: Monday, November 1st, 2010 (23:59 Samoan time)
Acceptance notification: Friday, December 10th, 2010 (23:59 Samoan time)
Camera-ready copy: Monday, January 10th, 2011 (23:59 Samoan time)

Overview

Innovations in modularity have had a profound effect on Programming Languages and Software Engineering over several decades. They have shaped the way we think about software, as well as the software itself.

The software landscape is changing rapidly, and is already very different from when much of the seminal research on modularity was done. Writing of single, standalone programs or systems is largely a thing of the past. Instead, we see development of services, advanced web applications, product lines and systems of systems. Many of these are long-running, 24/7 systems that can never be brought down, and that might be self-repairing. Some run on new kinds of platforms, like the cloud. Integration of existing software is often more important than writing new software. We are moving towards ultra-large systems, in which central control is not possible.

The software-development landscape is changing rapidly too. More and more projects are distributed across the world. There is increasing concern about governance, from both the legislative and business points of view.

For this track, we invite high-quality papers proposing visions of modularity for this new landscape, addressing current and future challenges. We do not expect visions to be realized and fully validated yet, but we do expect a paper to provide evidence of the viability of the vision it presents, as well as its importance. This can be by compelling argument or analysis, for example.

When thinking about modularity for the future, it is important to understand exactly what modularity is, what benefits it provides to software engineering, and what the relationships are between various properties and such benefits. For example, how does strength of encapsulation interact with maintainability and adaptability? For this reason, we also invite high-quality papers on the foundations of modularity. We expect such papers to include discussion of the implications for visions of modularity.

The following is a list of some topic areas of interest where innovations in modularity are called for. Papers are welcome in these areas or others; the list is intended to stimulate thought but in no way to be restrictive:

• Modern platforms, such as the cloud and massively-parallel systems
• Software services
• Product lines
• Web applications
• Long-running, highly-available systems
• Systems involving sensitive data, such as medical records
• Ultra-large systems
• Integration of disparate systems
• Modularity across the entire software lifecycle, including modularity for early-lifecycle artifacts and modules that span lifecycle phases
• Beyond artifacts, e.g., modularity based on tasks, activities and processes
• Various programming paradigms, such as rule-based and map-reduce systems
• Modern development practices, such as distributed development and agile development
• Modularity in support of governance
• Foundations upon which innovations in modularity can be built

Instructions for Authors

To allow for feedback and revision during the submission process, this track will have a rolling submission period before the final submission deadline. A paper submitted during the rolling submission period will be reviewed within 6 weeks of submission by the Program Committee. The result of the review might be acceptance, rejection, or a request for revisions. When revisions are requested, the authors may make them and resubmit. As long as resubmission is within the rolling submission period, there will opportunity for further revision, if needed.

Once the rolling submission period has passed, authors may still submit original or revised papers up to the final submission deadline. These will be reviewed to the same standards; there will be no penalty for not having utilized rolling submission, but there will be no opportunity for revision before the acceptance decision is made.

Submissions must be no more than 12 pages in length (including bibliography and any appendices), and must be in standard ACM SIG Proceedings format. All papers must be submitted in PDF format, through CyberChair.

The submission deadline, length limitations and formatting instructions are firm: any submissions that deviate from these will be rejected by the track chair. Submitted papers must adhere to SIGPLAN’s republication policy. Authors should strive to make the technical content of their papers understandable to a broad audience.

Publication

Accepted papers will be published in a special Modularity Visions section of the main conference proceedings. They will therefore appear in the ACM Digital Library. Authors of accepted papers will be expected to revise their papers based on reviewers’ comments, and to provide camera-ready versions of the papers by the camera-ready deadline. They will also be required to sign the standard ACM copyright form.

Contact Information

Questions about this track are most welcome. Please send them by email to the track chair, Harold Ossher, at modularity@aosd.net.

• A Domain-Specific Approach to Architecturing Error Handling in Pervasive Computing
• A Dynamic Evaluation of the Precision of Static Heap Abstractions
• A Graph-based Approach to API Usage Adaptation
• A Simple Inductive Synthesis Methodology and its Applications
• A Study of Java’s non-Java Memory
• A Time-Aware Type System For Data-Race Protection and Guaranteed Initialization
• Agility in Context
• An Input-Centric Paradigm for Program Dynamic Optimizations
• Automatic Atomic Region Identification in Shared Memory SPMD Programs
• Back to the Futures: Incremental Parallelization of Existing Sequential Runtime Systems
• Component Adaptation and Assembly Using Interface Relations
• Composable Specifications for Structured Shared-Memory Communication
• Concurrent Programming with Revisions and Isolation Types
• Cross-Language, Type-Safe, and Transparent Object Sharing For Co-Located Managed Runtimes
• DEAL: Rich Heap Assertions (Almost) For Free
• Do I Use the Wrong Definition? DefUse: Definition-Use Invariants for Detecting Concurrency and Sequential Bugs
• Doubts about the Benefits of Static Type Systems: An Empirical Study on Development Time
• Dynamic Parallelization of Recursive Code: A Preliminary Report
• Efficient Modular Glass Box Software Model Checking
• From OO to FPGA: Fitting Round Objects into Square Hardware?
• G-Finder: Routing programming questions closer to the experts
• Hera-JVM: A Runtime System for Heterogeneous Multi-Core Architectures
• Homogeneous Family Sharing
• Instrumentation and Sampling Strategies for Cooperative Concurrency Bug Isolation
• Lime: a Java-Compatible and Synthesizable Language for Heterogeneous Architectures
• MetaFJig
• A Meta-circular Composition Language for Java-like Classes
• Modular Logic Metaprogramming
• Monitor Optimization via Stutter-equivalent Loop Transformation
• Mostly modular compilation of crosscutting concerns by contextual predicate dispatch
• Ownership and Immutability in Generic Java
• Parallel Inclusion-based Points-to Analysis
• Performance Analysis of Idle Programs
• Random testing for higher-order, stateful programs
• Reasoning about Multiple Related Abstractions with MultiStar
• Refactoring References for Library Migration
• Scalable and Systematic Detection of Buggy Inconsistencies in Source Code
• Specifying and Implementing Refactorings
• SPUR: A Trace-Based JIT Compiler for CIL
• Supporting Dynamic, Third-Party Code Customizations in JavaScript Using Aspects
• Symbolic Heap Abstraction with Demand-Driven Axiomatization of Memory Invariants
• Task Types for Pervasive Atomicity
• The Spoofax Language Workbench: Rules for Declarative Specification of Languages and IDEs
• The Two-State Solution: Native and Serializable Continuations Accord
• Tribal Ownership
• Type Classes as Objects and Implicits

1. 2010-06-10: “A New Software Developer Career” (Berlin, Linux-Tag 2010)
2. 2010-07-01: “A New Software Developer Career” (University of Jena, 4th International FLOSS Workshop)
3. 2010-07-02: “Open Source: Was es ist, wie es funktioniert, warum es nachhaltig ist” (University of Dortmund, Tag der Informatik)
4. 2010-07-15: “Was kommerzielle Softwareentwicklung von Open Source lernen kann” (Erlangen, Develop Group Forum)

• What Closed Source Development Can Learn From Open Source
• The Single Vendor Commercial Open Source Business Model
• A New Software Developer Career

1. What Closed Source Development Can Learn From Open Source

Open source is not only a type of software, it is also an approach to software development that is different from traditional plan-driven and agile software development methods. Open source is frequently more effective, because it can focus on project success and community without the distractions that are so common in traditional software development organizations. This talk explains the principles of open source software development, surprising effects it causes, and how traditional software development firms can benefit from adopting some of open source’s best practices. A key part of the presentation will focus on firm-internal software forges, which organizations like HP, IBM, SAP, and Microsoft have been using to their advantage.

Audience: Project managers, process departments, quality assurance, software developers

Format: 30-90min (talk)

2. The Single-Vendor Commercial Open Source Business Model

Open source is changing how software is built and how money is made. In particular software startups have found that open source can be used as a disruptive business strategy to win new or existing markets. Commercial open source vendors need to understand new revenue models and follow a new intellectual rights practice. Most importantly, vendors need to learn new skills of open source community engagement and management. This talk explains the single-vendor commercial open source business model and how it is superior to traditional closed-source software business models. The talk explains business processes, business functions, best practices and how they form a coherent whole to win in the market place.

Note: The talk only touches on selected few best practices, the tutorial version provides a more comprehensive introduction.

Audience: Executives, business strategists, venture capitalists, product managers, software developers

Formats: 30-90min (talk), 3h (half-day tutorial), 6h (full-day tutorial)

3. A New Software Developer Career

Open source creates a new career path for software developers, orthogonal to the traditional career in software development organizations. Advancing on this career path 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 on this path.

Audience: Project managers, software developers, human resources

Format: 30-90min (talk)