If you are interested in open source and software engineering, please take a look at these upcoming events:
Disclaimer: Except for the last one I’m on each program committee.
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Yesterday, SAP’s CTO Vishal Sikka called for a more open approach to the Java standardization process (JCP), asking SUN to stop ruling it with a heavy hand. Not surprisingly, he got some pushback using the argument that SAP isn’t one to talk about being more open, given its slow involvement with open source.
I don’t think that this is a fair critique. SAP has always provided the source code of its main business applications suite to user-customers as part of a commercial license, and users have always customized SAP’s business suite to their heart’s content. In fact, it is the only way to make it work for their needs.
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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 maturity of the design under inspection. This paper presents a quantifiable and observable definition of this metric. The metric is illustrated and qualitatively validated using four real-world case studies. We present several hypotheses of the metric’s meaning and their implications, including the one about design maturity. We propose that the design pattern density of a maturing framework has a fixed point and we show that if software design patterns make learning frameworks easier, a framework’s design pattern density is a measure of how much easier it will become.
The talk slides are available as a PDF file and are licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
For a discussion of the talk’s contents I recommend reading the original article.
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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 much they publish). Many of these journals are not open access but rather require hefty fees to give you access. Hence, researchers might not be getting some of the expected reputation for their work.
Such a requirement is likely to come down the pipe in many other countries as well. Its impact on the academic publishing industry is not to be underestimated, it is nothing short of Schumpeterian. Economics is aligning itself against the publishers of high-priced journals. As open access journals as well as professional organizations like the ACM show, it is possible to have a publishing process at a much cheaper price tag than those of the likes of Elsevier and Springer.
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Yesterday, I participated in the local JUG’s discussion of the Sun acquisition by Oracle. Somewhat to my surprise, the general opinion was dismissive of OpenOffice’s future at Oracle. I haven’t spent much prior thought on this, but to me, OpenOffice seems to fit much better with Oracle than with Sun, at least on a strategic level. The reasoning is quite simple: OpenOffice can help Oracle’s application business.
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We had a busy first week over at the website of the Open Source Research group:
Fun! And don’t be shy, take a look!
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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 question (and also include a few remedies). In a nutshell,
open source is hard for closed source vendors, (1) because they have a different risk/reward profile than startups and have a higher fear around legal uncertainties, (2) because they would have to undergo substantial and painful organizational change, easily involving lay-offs, and (3) because current sales incentives are not set up to support cross-selling open source.
This presentation is an alpha release, which is to say, I doubt I’ve nailed it all. Please tell me what you think I’ve missed or where you dis/agree with my thoughts! Because of this, I maintain full copyright of the presentation. Later revisions will hopefully include your feedback (and give proper credits) and will be released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
The presentation is available as a PDF file.
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As you may seen in an earlier blog post, I’m starting in a new position as a professor of software engineering focussing on open source software at the University of Erlangen. In this post, I’m laying out my abbreviated research agenda as of September 2009.
The overarching goal of my group’s research is to comprehensively define “the next big” software development method. To that end, we will work to unify agile software development methods with open source software development. Agile methods can cope with changing requirements but don’t scale up well. Open source methods can cope with changing requirements and also scale up well. However, open source remains poorly understood as a development method and practices vary significantly from project to project. Agile methods are increasingly being adopted in the enterprise, but it is open source methods that innovate intra- and inter-company collaboration as well as vendor-customer relationships. Given prior significant research on agile methods, the focus of my group’s work will be on understanding open source methods and practices in both an engineering and a business context.
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After 12 years of working in the high-tech industry, I’m changing gears. I left my prior industry job and am starting today, September 1st, as the “professor for open source software” in the computer science department of the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Bavaria, Germany. This is a free (not tied to a chair) full (fully tenured) professorship. I’m looking forward to joining the department and collaborating with my new colleagues at the university, local industry, and beyond.
The professorship is well-funded and I’ll be seeking to hire Ph.D. students right away. For my research plans, please see the upcoming blog post. For now, I’ll let my favorite (ex-)Stanford comic strip do the talking. If you aren’t reading Ph.D. comics yet, check it out.
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For now, the final paper in this sequence of short publications of how open source software projects document their code. The paper is basically a more comprehensive summary of prior articles, with a bit more of data. Here the abstract and reference:
Authors: Oliver Arafat, Dirk Riehle
Abstract: The development processes of open source software are different from traditional closed source development processes. Still, open source software is frequently of high quality. This raises the question of how and why open source software creates high quality and whether it can maintain this quality for ever larger project sizes. In this paper, we look at one particular quality indicator, the density of comments in open source software code. We find that successful open source projects follow a consistent practice of documenting their source code, and we find that the comment density is independent of team and project size.
Reference: “The Commenting Practice of Open Source.” In Companion to the Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Application(OOPSLA Onward! 2009). ACM Press, 2009. Forthcoming.
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