Software Research and the Industry

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.

Over at the OSR Group’s website we just announced that I have joined the scientific advisory board of OpenSAGA, a soon to be released open source infrastructure project for eGovernment services. (SAGA is German for Standards and Architectures for eGovernment Applications so it is somewhat Germany centric.) OpenSAGA was started by one company, Quinscape GmbH, which has carried all of the development costs so far. It is a project with substantial potential. It could aid in the faster creation of better and more innovative eGovernment services in Germany and beyond.

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These are the next three public open source (research) talks I’ll be doing:

1. 2010-04-25: “Open Source Economics” at the 2010 NPFOSST workshop, KACST, Saudia Arabia.
2. 2010-04-30: “Open Source Software Research” at the 2010 Erlanger Informatik-Tag, Erlangen, Germany. (In German.)
3. 2010-05-05: “Why Open Source is Hard for Closed Source Vendors” at JAX 2010, Mainz, Germany.

I just finished listening to Marten Mickos at PARC Forum on open source businesses. Below please find my list of key statements from this talk. Most are well-known, some remain controversial, however, as a researcher it is good to be able to pinpoint such statements.

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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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These days, I get involved in a lot of discussions about open source economics. Usually, they lead to an invitation to present our research and clarify “how open source works” to the audience. I’ve found it helpful to distinguish these three rather different areas of open source economics: (1) direct profits, (2) public welfare, (3) labor market. In more detail:

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Update, 2010-03-19: Linux Magazin made the talk video available. Their data shows that more than 10,000 people watched it live!

I noticed an increasing interest into a general-interest talk of mine on how open source creates a new software developer career. This is not a rara (pep) talk but rather (I hope) an economically rational and sound analysis of changes in the software developer labor market brought about by open source. Here is the current abstract:

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Next three public talks on open source that I’ll be giving in Germany:

• Nuremberg, 25.02.10 – Talend Business Lunch, talk topic: Sustainability of Commercial Open Source
• Hannover, 02.03.10 – CeBIT Open Source Forum keynote: Open Source Software Developer Careers
• Erlangen, 30.04.10 – Tag der Informatik, Uni Erlangen-Nürnberg: Open Source and the Software End-Game

Update 2010-05-28: The accepted papers are listed here now. If you are looking for a well-documented object-oriented framework to try your method, check-out this JUnit 3.8 documentation. There is more object-oriented software design case study documentation, of course.

OOPSLA 2010 Research Papers

October 17 to 20
Reno/Tahoe Nevada, USA

www.splashcon.org

Paper Submission Deadline: March 25, 2010
Accept/Reject Notification Date: May 24, 2010

OOPSLA 2010 solicits research papers that present new research, report novel technical results, advance the state of the art, or discuss experience or experimentation. The scope of OOPSLA includes all aspects of programming languages and software engineering, broadly construed.

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I will be participating in the Computing Community Consortium’s workshop on the future of open source research at UC Irvine next month. The organizers asked participants to provide a short opinion on three research areas they feel warrant further research. I chose the following three general topics:

1. Quantitative Analyses of Actual Programmer Behavior
2. Improved Open Source Process and Tooling
3. Decision Models for Industry Participation in Community Open Source

You can find the full descriptions of these topics over at the website of the open source research group. For your convenience, I’ve also appended it as a PDF file.