Author: Dirk Riehle
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The Commercial Open Source Pledge
I’m pretty frustrated by some of the discussion around the recent relicensing decisions by commercial open source companies. A fair bit of it seems confused to me, and I think this is mostly due to commentators not understanding the purpose of community for the vendor. So I decided to write a hypothetical pledge for venture-capital…
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Market Segmentation in the Open Core Model
Life is exciting in commercial open source land. On Tuesday this week, another commercial open source vendor relicensed its product while at the same time disavowing the open core model, which they call a tiered approach to their business. This disavowel piqued my interest, not because the open core model is good or bad, but…
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Agile Methods and the Magic Triangle
In software engineering, the magic triangle is a well-known concept to illustrate the relationship between scope, time, and cost of a software development project. Of the three (scope, time, cost), pick two, and the third will magically follow. (It is determined by the other two.) Scope means features (or delivered functionality), time means duration or…
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Position statement on the use of ML / AI techniques in software engineering for the adesso Hochschulbeirat
I just submitted the following short position statement on how to work with ML / AI techniques in software engineering. This is a statement on using such techniques for the engineering of software, not in the software itself, which is a (not completely, but mostly) separate issue. ML / AI techniques can be used in…
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From the Bag of Commercial Open Source Tricks: Paying for the Upgrade
On a recent trip to Montreal, I reconnected with Marc Laporte, leader of the WikiSuite project and an old friend and fellow wiki enthusiast. Naturally, we talked about open source business strategies and he pointed me to one way of how commercial open source companies make money: They don’t provide you with a free upgrade…
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How to Convince Your Management of the Need for an Open Source Program Office
Here is the simplest eye-opener that I have found in my consulting practice to convince management of the need for an open source program office: Ask your manager to look at the open source license section under legal notices on their mobile phone. Ask them to scroll down to the end (they’ll never finish). Then…