Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 1. Software Industry

  • The new coming relicensing scare?

    The new coming relicensing scare?

    What if commercial source-available vendors stopped licensing their product under their source-available license and only offered a traditional commercial license? In my current research interviews on commercial open source, two alternative intellectual property (IP) strategies are becoming visible: (1) Stay with open source and rely on trademarks, quality, and speed and (2) forego open source…

  • Re-relicensing to open source explained

    Re-relicensing to open source explained

    In March 2024, Redis removed the open source license of its popular in-memory database and added the SSPL-1.0 license, a non-open source license according to the Open Source Initiative, the steward of the open source definition. In April 2025, Redis reversed course and re-relicensed back to open source by adding the AGPL-3.0 license to its…

  • The software bill of materials [Computer Magazine]

    The software bill of materials [Computer Magazine]

    I’m happy to report that the 34th article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. As always, please consider writing an article proposal! Title The Software Bill of Materials Keywords Bill Of Materials, Open Source Software, Software Supply Chain, […] Authors Dirk Riehle Publication Computer vol. 58, no. 4 (April 2025),…

  • Improving country-level competitiveness through open source consortia

    Improving country-level competitiveness through open source consortia

    The German economy would be better off, and overall more competitive, if its participants collaborated on the development of open-source software they need to operate their business. They could free themselves from (some) of the dependencies (vendor lock-in) on the Silicon Valley while reducing overall costs, setting standards, etc. Such collaboration is typically industry-specific: Open-source…

  • What’s wrong with German university startup incubators?

    What’s wrong with German university startup incubators?

    Let’s use the simple root cause analysis method of asking multiple times why. 1. Too many German university incubators are a joke. Why are they a joke? 2. Because they don’t deliver what they should be delivering: Return on investment for the commercialization of all the intellectual property created from public funding given to them.…

  • A systematic review of common beginner programming mistakes in data engineering [CSEE&T 2025]

    A systematic review of common beginner programming mistakes in data engineering [CSEE&T 2025]

    Abstract The design of effective programming languages, libraries, frameworks, tools, and platforms for data engineering strongly depends on their ease and correctness of use. Anyone who ignores that it is humans who use these tools risks building tools that are useless, or worse, harmful. To ensure our data engineering tools are based on solid foundations,…