Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Author: Dirk Riehle

  • Conference talk and magazine article for the Open Logistics Foundation

    Conference talk and magazine article for the Open Logistics Foundation

    In May 2023, I gave a talk about user-led open source consortia at the Open Logistics Foundation’s (OLF) open source innovation day. In a user-led open source consortium, software users come together to develop or sponsor the development of the software they need to run their business as open-source software. The OLF is an excellent…

  • Should open source projects denounce users who aren’t donating money?

    Should open source projects denounce users who aren’t donating money?

    Right now, the top blog post on the OpenCV website (an open source library for computer vision and machine learning) is about how Snap Inc. uses OpenCV in its products (and presumably makes a lot of money partly thanks to it) but does not donate at all to the project. The blog post promises to…

  • A systematic analysis of problems in open collaborative data engineering [TSC Journal]

    A systematic analysis of problems in open collaborative data engineering [TSC Journal]

    Abstract Collaborative workflows are common in open-source software development. They reduce individual costs and improve the quality of work results. Open data shares many characteristics with open-source software as it can be used, modified, and redistributed by anyone, for free. However, in contrast to open-source software engineering, collaborative data engineering on open data lacks a…

  • Myopia: Is it a feature or a product?

    Myopia: Is it a feature or a product?

    A common mistake of inexperienced entrepreneurs is to confuse a feature with a product. The best recent illustrating example I can think of is the flashlight app: For a short moment in time, you could sell flashlight apps for mobile phones until Apple and Google came in, assimilated the flashlight function as a feature into…

  • Will open source fix the public cloud vendor lock-in?

    Will open source fix the public cloud vendor lock-in?

    Over on Twi… what-shall-not-be-named, Kelsey Hightower argued that companies want on-premise back and that this is happening by on-premise product vendors copying cloud APIs in their products: It might just turn out that the cloud was the best way to research and design better ways of managing our systems, and thanks to the open source…

  • Let’s celebrate relicensing from an open source to a proprietary license

    Let’s celebrate relicensing from an open source to a proprietary license

    tl;dr Commercial open source firms are beneficial to society, even if they eventually license away from open source, because they are exploring a search space for useful open-source software that is otherwise hard to get to. Commercial open source firms that license away from open source licenses to non-compete licenses don’t get a lot of…