Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 2. Building Products

  • Is isEven() a bad function to have?

    Is isEven() a bad function to have?

    Someone on Twitter got all exasperated that there is an isEven() function in Javascript to compute whether a number is an even number. After all it is equivalent to the simple expression of ((n % 2) == 0); why would they not use this? Well, already this simple example contains most of what you need…

  • You just don’t understand (open source edition)

    You just don’t understand (open source edition)

    Listening to open source developers complaining about companies not donating money and then getting ignored by said companies reminds me of a quarreling couple, where one side has a lot to say and the other side is just silent. Let me turn this silence into statements a company would make. Let’s go! Open source developer:…

  • Open source dependencies are investments

    Open source dependencies are investments

    The Linux Foundation’s research arm just published a report about interviews with 32 maintainers of critical open source projects (local copy). Only 62% of these maintainers, i.e. 20 people, were employed by their organizations to work on these open source components. I consider this low and would have expected a higher number. What’s worse, only…

  • The business impact of inner source and how to quantify it [CSUR Journal]

    The business impact of inner source and how to quantify it [CSUR Journal]

    Abstract Inner-source software development is the practice of using open source practices for firm-internal software development. Practitioner reports have shown that inner source can increase flexibility and reduce costs. Despite the potential benefits of inner source, there has been little research on its impact on businesses and their processes. To address this gap, we conducted…

  • 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,…

  • Open source license inconsistencies on GitHub [TOSEM Journal]

    Open source license inconsistencies on GitHub [TOSEM Journal]

    Abstract: Almost all software, open or closed, builds on open source software and therefore needs to comply with the license obligations of the open source code. Not knowing which licenses to comply with poses a legal danger to anyone using open source software. This article investigates the extent of inconsistencies between licenses declared by an…