Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 4. Society-at-large

  • The societal value of commercial open source

    The societal value of commercial open source

    The heat about recent relicensing in open source land has dissipated a bit. To recap in a nutshell what had people riled up: Venture-capital-backed startups increasingly went to market by providing their software product, in particular software infrastructure components, under an open source license (dual-licensing, next to their commercial license). Eventually, payday came, and they…

  • Interview on open source and security with DLF Kultur (in German)

    Interview on open source and security with DLF Kultur (in German)

    I had a ten minute interview with the enjoyably competent Marcus Richter and Hagen Terschüren of DLF Kultur last week. It aired as part of the Breitband show on Saturday April 6th. Our topic was open source infrastructure, security challenges to it, and whether the state needs to step up. It is available as XZ-Backdoor:…

  • 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…

  • Open Source Explained lecture in TUM lecture series on digital sustainability

    Open Source Explained lecture in TUM lecture series on digital sustainability

    Today I had the pleasure of giving a talk about open source in the TUM lecture series on digital sustainability, organized by Alexander Pretschner of TU Munich, bidt, and TU Wien. The talk was in German and streamed, but not recorded. Below please find my slides.

  • The Pegel Alarm open data challenge (a thread)

    The Pegel Alarm open data challenge (a thread)

    The struggles of @LilithWittmann to make the Handelsregister of Germany freely available and easily accessible reminded me of our own struggles with different German state-level organizations, trying to get access to open data for rivers and water ways in 2014. 1/ We had developed an open-source app called PegelAlarm @EichhornPhilipp (now defunct) which lets users…

  • Open source and the hyphen

    Open source and the hyphen

    You may have seen the repeated fights over whether open-source software should be spelled with a hyphen or not. It just flared up on Wikipedia, again. The rules are clear, in my opinion. Still, the situation is a misery. First things first: If “open source” is used as an adjective (attribute) in front of a…