Author: Dirk Riehle

  • Open source promises not made and broken

    Open source promises not made and broken

    Using open-source software in products and projects is not a no-brainer. Like with any software, introducing a dependency on an open source component creates a lock-in that should be thought through well. All too often, people are lazy when thinking (or not thinking) through such decisions. Case in point 1: An open source programmer on…

  • Openness is a red Herring, lock-in is the real deal

    Openness is a red Herring, lock-in is the real deal

    If you are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it should be easy to switch to Suse Linux Enterprise Server, right? You’d do that if you disagree with Red Hat’s pricing and Suse provides a better deal. Sadly, a real-world calculation has to take the switching costs into account, because RHEL and SLES are not exactly…

  • The corporate open source strategy [Rebooting Computing Conference]

    The corporate open source strategy [Rebooting Computing Conference]

    Today I’m giving a talk on the corporate open source strategy at the TTI Vanguard Rebooting Computing conference. In the available 30 min. I’m focusing on the perspective of software users, as this is not a conference for the software industry but for everyone else (with a stronghold in financial services). Below please find a…

  • Upcoming talks in June and July 2023

    Upcoming talks in June and July 2023

    2023-05-31: User-led open source projects (free, in person, in Berlin) at Open Logistics Foundation’s Open Source Innovation Day 2023 2023-06-23: The corporate open source strategy (commercial, in person, in Montreal) at the TTI/Vanguard Rebooting Computing conference 2023-06-26: Creating a ROS Distribution (free, in person, in Lisbon) at INESC-ID / University of Lisbon respectively, courtesy of…

  • Visual spaghetti robotics edition

    Visual spaghetti robotics edition

    Ever since the Intrinsic launch event a few weeks back, I wanted to write a long article on how the shown approach of visual programming for robotics is likely to fail. This prediction is based on forty years of experience with visual spaghetti in software engineering. I never got around writing a long blog post,…

  • Why Scrum projects are harder at a university than in industry

    Why Scrum projects are harder at a university than in industry

    I teach distributed Scrum to student teams every semester. Sometimes, industry tells me how much easier it must be to run Scrum projects at a university rather than “in real life” i.e. in industry. I beg to differ: Running Scrum projects at a university is much harder than running Scrum projects in industry, for the…