Open source, building products, software startups, and industry strategy by Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle
A person’s universal basic income (UBI) is income that this person is guaranteed to receive whatever their living circumstances. The income should allow the person to have a humane life, i.e. pay for food and housing, healthcare and so forth.
Continue reading “Funding Universal Basic Income with Rent From Your Data”
I’m glad to report that we will have a new open source conference in Europe, focused on commercial open source. I’ll be a speaker and panelist and helped initiate the event. It is not the first of its kind, but I’m very happy that we have a new one with hopefully more staying power than previous attempts.
Continue reading “A New Commercial Open Source Conference”
An important benefit of an open source project is that it is long-lived and can’t go out of business. Unlike a closed source supplier, which can go bankrupt, your usage and update rights to an open source software can’t suddenly disappear.
From working with customers I know very well that the manufacturers of (comparatively) expensive machines like cars, trains, and planes have long warmed up to open source and appreciate that open source projects will stick around when (some) closed source suppliers are long gone or killed their products.
Continue reading “Where is Open Source in Factory Automation?”
In September 2020, I will be teaching a workshop series on commercial open source startups at UC Santa Cruz (and starting November, as a course, at FAU). The series at UCSC is being faciliated by CROSS, the Center for Research in Open Source Software, and I’m getting help from Thomas Otter (@vendorprisey). If you would like to register, check out the official announcement! If you are affiliated with UC Santa Cruz, talk to Stephanie Lieggi (or me) to get in! If you are just curious, here is the general syllabus.
A week ago I asked the Twitterverse how to call community open source projects that are not hosted by a foundation. By saying community open source I excluded both commercial open source and corporately-run open source. The options were plain, plain old, traditional, and ungoverned. Ungoverned won with a small margin at 34% of the 111 votes. But this is only a part of the story.
Continue reading “What to Call Traditional Community Open Source Projects Not Hosted by a Foundation?”
Over on Twitter, that endless source of distraction, Matt Asay asked: “Do developers care about open source?” Apparently, he is asking in response to an interview he had with a vendor who claimed that developers don’t care whether their service is available as open source (it is not). According to the vendor, developers just want to use a reliable service (and pay).
Continue reading “A Researcher’s Perspective on “Do Developers Care About Open Source?””
I’m happy to report that the ninth article in the Open Source Expanded column of IEEE Computer has been published.
| Title | Open source research software |
| Keywords | Open source software, scientific computing, software engineering, artificial intelligence, licenses |
| Authors | Wilhelm Hasselbring, Leslie Carr, Simon Hettrick, Heather Packer, and Thanassis Tiropanis |
| Publication | Computer vol. 53, no. 8 (August 2020), pp. 84-88. |
Slowly but surely, non-software vendors have been waking up to realize that Silicon Valley, specifically, software vendors, are out to eat their lunch. In 2011, Marc Andreessen stated that software is eating the world, in 2015, Geoffrey Immelt said that GE is in the information business, and now in 2020, Volkswagen declared itself to be(come) a software-driven automobile vendor. However, this is more easily said than done, and the path to taking charge of your software future is fraught with possibly serious mistakes. One such mistake is to create your own internal software organisation. A better choice is to leave developers close to the products, but set-up an inner source program to connect them across the organization. Let me revisit this topic.
Continue reading “How Non-Software Vendors Fail and How Inner Source Can Help”
You may have notices the brouhaha in response to Google’s announcement to hand over trademark management of its popular Istio, Angular, and Gerrit open source projects to the newly created Open Usage Commons (OUC) non-profit. While I gave Google the benefit of the doubt, the vast majority of commentary assumed that Google only had its own interests at heart and tried to add the appearance of openness to its projects without actually delivering. Google dominates the OUC and therefore any decisions.
Here, I want to focus on why people, most notably cloud providers, care. I will ignore sensibilities (broken promises or not) and focus on the business perspective. As I wrote before, of the three projects given to the OUC, the heat is on Istio, a (micro-)services mesh software. Angular and Gerrit may be important projects in general, but don’t matter much to Google’s revenue. So, what is it about Istio?
Continue reading “Why Istio Matters to Google”
Yesterday, the Open Usage Commons (OUC) foundation announced itself. It is a non-profit which wants to ensure free and fair trademark use of the open source projects under its guidance. My Twitter feed was quick to denounce the OUC as a vanity foundation. It certainly is not. A vanity foundation serves to aggrandize its creators, and a name like “The Great Company Open Source Foundation” would then be apt. This is not the case here. Rather the OUC makes specific statements about trademark enforcement, so it has a purpose that is not vanity. Just what is that purpose, and why did existing foundations not fit the bill?
Continue reading “Interpreting the Purpose of the Open Usage Commons Foundation”