Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 1.2 Open Source (Industry)

Amazon’s announcement about Corretto and Java’s future

Ever since Oracle got their hands on Java (by way of acquiring Sun Microsystems), it has worked hard on making money of it. As far as I can tell, it has been as unsuccessful at this as the prior owner, Sun. Compared to Sun, Oracle upped the ante by way of suing Google over Dalvik,…

2018-11-15
No open-source software allowed in products and services

I was recently pointed to a German bank’s AGB (general purchasing terms and conditions), which contained the following clause: 9.5 The SUPPLIER guarantees that as part of provided services no open source software has been used. I think such a clause warrants a deeply humored #MUWHAHA. First, the factual. Even Windows contains open-source software. Open-source…

2018-11-12
On the state of using vs. contributing to open source

Digital Ocean just published a survey of developers that indicates how companies are getting more comfortable with using open source, but remain much less comfortable with contributing to open source. Matt Asay and Chris Aniszczyk picked up on this, suggesting that open source will become more sustainable if we get those contribution numbers up. What…

2018-11-02
Open source license compliance in mobile apps

Open source license compliance is not for the faint of heart. Among many things, a company needs to tell the recipients of a distribution which open source software is used in their products. In the case of mobile apps, free or not, the user is the recipient and the app is the distribution. Downloading an…

2018-10-29
If GitHub was like Berlin…

Much open source research assumes that all open source projects are alike and that if you take enough of them, you can claim generalizability for your conclusions. GitHub is the main source of such mischief, because of its size and availability. If GitHub was like Berlin, and projects on GitHub were like the people of…

2018-10-06
Uncovering the periphery: A qualitative survey of episodic volunteering in free/libre and open source software communities [TSE Journal]

Abstract: Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities are composed, in part, of volunteers, many of whom contribute infrequently. However, these infrequent volunteers contribute to the sustainability of FLOSS projects, and should ideally be encouraged to continue participating, even if they cannot be persuaded to contribute regularly. Infrequent contributions are part of a trend which…

2018-09-27