Software Research and the Industry
Dirk Riehle's blog on everything computer science and more
On a whim, I asked my Twitterverse (which includes a fair number of computer scientists) what they think about the following question:
Continue reading “Anecdotal Evidence on the Method Wars”When peer-reviewing somebody else’s work submitted for publication, what should you do if you find that the authors have a different belief than you about what can be known?
Self-enlightened contributions to open source projects are (code) contributions that come about because a company chooses to contribute. The opposite is forced open sourcing, which typically happens when a reciprocal license like the GPLv2 forces a company to lay open some source code.
Self-enlightened contribution is hard!
Continue reading “Why Self-Enlightened Contribution to Open Source Projects is Difficult”
A professor, so my belief, can play an important role in generating startups from University research. Most professors don’t, but some do, and I wanted to summarize my experiences as to what would be the perfect combination in one person.
There are three ingredients to get a university startup set-up and off the ground: (1) team, (2) idea, and (3) seed funding. Team, as anyone in startup-land knows, is by far the most important ingredient, as the others ultimately follow from it.
Continue reading “The Perfect Professor for University Startups”
I thought I’d illustrate how I’d solve the current licensing conundrum of single-vendor open source firms like MongoDB and Elastic using some graphics. In short: While open source application vendors can still dual-license, open source component vendors (like the companies just mentioned) need to triple-license to get the benefits of open source yet keep their competitors at bay.
Continue reading “Triple-Licensing Single-Vendor Open Source Components (Illustrated)”
On a lighter note, someone with a similar name to mine just used one of my email addresses to register for the Lexus Remote app. Judging by the email I got, using this email address that I own, I can register for the app and presumably do something about the car behind it. Does Lexus already offer a “summon” feature? Seems like the car is based in the U.S. so it would be good if it was amphibious.
Someone on Twitter asked this question and people loved to weigh in. Most answered: “No, just get an old $200 laptop.” While not wrong, this answer misses the point. Coding, here, apparently means reading and writing code. For that, indeed, any cheap computer will do. However, being able to read and write code does not mean you will be able to build and ship systems, which is what customers pay for.
Continue reading “Do You Need a Macbook to Learn to Code? (Coding vs. Systems Building)”
The other day I ran into one of the oldest software engineering tropes in the book: That software engineering should be more like work in a factory, and that developers are best equated to assembly line workers who put together a software product by assembling components to a specification. I wasn’t sure whether I should be amused or irritated. In any case, this nonsensical idea has long been debunked by Peter Naur, before it even took roots in later work by others. In Naur’s words, programming is (best viewed as) theory building, and this gets to the heart of the matter.
Continue reading “Why Software Engineering is Not Like Assembly Line Work”
As you may have noticed, the move away from approved open source licenses to commercial almost-like-open-source licenses by single-vendor-owned open source projects has created a lot of bad press for the vendors behind such software. I don’t really understand this, because for all that I can tell, a triple-licensing rather than just a dual-licensing approach could have solved their problems. Let me explain.
Continue reading “Solving the Commercial Open Source Licensing Dilemma With Triple-Licensing”
I just had another discussion with a reviewer (by way of an editor) who insisted that I cite (presumably their) work buried behind an Elsevier paywall. How obnoxious can you be?
It is 2019 and there are still editors and reviewers who consider articles, which are not freely accessible on the web, published research? That’s so wrong. Such work has been buried behind a paywall. It yet needs to be published.
Continue reading “Pay-walled Research Papers Do Not Constitute Published Work”
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 backed companies that those can adopt to be clear about their intentions. Then, future behavior doesn’t come as a surprise. Non VC-backed companies may want to tone down the return-on-investment verbiage. With that:
Continue reading “The Commercial Open Source Pledge”