Open collaboration within corporations using software forges [Software Magazine]

Abstract: Over the past 10 years, open source software has become an important cornerstone of the software industry. Commercial users have adopted it in standalone applications, and software vendors are embedding it in products. Surprisingly then, from a commercial perspective, open source software is developed differently from how corporations typically develop software. Research into how open source works has been growing steadily. One driver of such research is the desire to understand how commercial software development could benefit from open source best practices. Do some of these practices also work within corporations? If so, what are they, and how can we transfer them?

Keywords: Inner source, firm-internal open source, corporate source, software forge, open collaboration, open source.

Reference: Dirk Riehle, John Ellenberger, Tamir Menahem, Boris Mikhailovski, Yuri Natchetoi, Barak Naveh, Thomas Odenwald. “Open Collaboration within Corporations Using Software Forges.” IEEE Software, vol. 26, no. 2 (March/April 2009). Page 52-58.

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2009-02-11

2. Building Products, 2.5 Inner Source

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Olivier Berger

2011-09-09

I’m curious: is the forge still active and running GForge, and if so which version… or maybe FusionForge ?

Reply
1. Dirk Riehle
  
  2011-09-10
  
  AFAIK, SAP Forge is still based on GForge, and this has remained a big pain 🙂
  
  Reply
  1. Olivier Berger
    
    2011-09-15
    
    Like most people having customized it, there are problems, I guess… maybe FusionForge can help here (shameless sel promotion, as a contributor to it myself 😉
    
    Reply
Dirk Riehle

2010-09-07

@Sanket—thanks for the comment! I’m not aware of any such “payment” system, but I think it might be up for gaming quite easily. A point of comparison might be Wikipedia, where people make lots of small typo-fixes. These are useful but frequently are only motivated by racking up a high edit-count for some reason, e.g. maintaining standing in the Wikipedia community. –Dirk
PS: I hope Europe is treating you well!

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Sanket

2010-09-03

Btw, needless to say, very interesting read!

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Sanket

2010-09-03

Hi Prof. Dirk,
It’s great to revisit your works on the less known/researched topics in Open Source. An idea transpired in my mind regarding an alternative organisation architecture. What if the amount of “credit” for a project be given on the basis of Commits contributed by a person ?
If this “credit” is used as a measure/qualifier for the benefits he gets like pay etc, how will this affect (positive/negative), the dynamics of a project specially in an organization using Soft Forges for internal development. I would consider it to be good use of extracting open source properties to rather closed development!

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Dirk Riehle

2009-02-12

@Medha—Glad you like it! And I hope to see you at ICSE 2009 in Vancouver.

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Medha Umarji

2009-02-12

Hi Dirk,
I read your paper and found it extremely interesting. I am currently studying tools that support collaborative software development and your paper has given me lots to think about. Thanks!
Medha (We had met at the EUSE Workshop at ICSE in Leipzig)

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