Category: 1.2 Open Source (Industry)

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Successful Open Source, with Little or No Agile

I’ll be participating in the panel “Successful Open Source, with little or no Agile” at Agile 2008 in Toronto, Canada, on August 7th, 2008.

Successful Open Source, with Little or No Agile

Agile adoption in the Open Source community ranges from some to none for most successful teams.

  • Can these communities learn anything from each other?
  • Are these two communities one in the same?
  • Do Open Source projects and Agile projects succeed or fail for the same reasons?

The panelists, Dennis Byrne, Dirk Riehle, Christian Robottom Reis and Naresh Jain, will use their collective experience to answer these and many other questions. We’ll also have one empty chair for anyone from the audience to be a part of the panel temporarily.

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Conflict of Interest in Open Source and PostgreSQL Replication

Community open source is open source that is not owned by any particular company. Rather, ownership is shared among a large number of diverse stakeholders. Given the right (read: permissive) license, commercial companies can provide extensions to the community project, earning a living. Since such extensions are a unique selling point of these companies, one might think that they would prefer to keep the community project small and limited in features to facilitate an easy upsell to their more comprehensive offering. This thought becomes particularly intriguing given that commercial companies typically hire the core developers of such community projects to bring the necessary expertise in-house, and as some argue, to influence the project to their liking.

I think that this common belief misses the point.

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FOSSBazaar: Open Source Under the CIO’s Radar Screen: Good or Bad?

Commercial open source has a peculiar sales process. Frequently, when a firm decides to buy (license) a specific type of software like a content management system or a wiki engine, they’ll find that their company already employs multiple solutions, downloaded for free from the Internet. By some measures, this is dangerous to IT governance, as it bypasses corporate purchasing and operating regulations. On the other hand, open source empowers IT users to make their own decisions early on without having to go through lengthy approval processes, keeping them nimble and speedy. So, is commercial open source good or bad for IT operations and the CIO?

Read more on FOSSBazaar…

Archived copy of article.

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The Total Growth of Open Source [OSS 2008]

Authors: Amit Deshpande, Dirk Riehle

Abstract: Software development is undergoing a major change away from a fully closed software process towards a process that incorporates open source software in products and services. Just how significant is that change? To answer this question we need to look at the overall growth of open source as well as its growth rate. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the growth of more than 5000 active and popular open source software projects. We show that the total amount of source code as well as the total number of open source projects is growing at an exponential rate. Previous research showed linear and quadratic growth in lines of source code of individual open source projects. Our work shows that open source is expanding into new domains and applications at an exponential rate.

Reference: In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2008). Springer Verlag, 2008. Page 197-209.

Available as a PDF file or in HTML, also see the Addendum.

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Global Open Source Trends and Public Initiatives

I’ll be moderating the experts panel on “Global Open Source Trends and Public Initiatives” at the half-day Global Open Source Conference on March 24th, 2008, in San Francisco. Panel participants are Mark Radcliffe of DLA Piper, Sander Ruiter from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Tony Wasserman of CMU West, and Arnaud Le Hors of IBM. The event precedes the Open Source Business Conference which will start the next day.

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Continuous Integration in Open Source Software Development [OSS 2008]

Authors: Amit Deshpande, Dirk Riehle

Abstract: Commercial software firms are increasingly using and contributing to open source software. Thus, they need to understand and work with open source software development processes. This paper investigates whether the practice of continuous integration of agile software development methods has had an impact on open source software projects. Using fine-granular data from more than 5000 active open source software projects we analyze the size of code contributions over a project’s life-span. Code contribution size has stayed flat. We interpret this to mean that open source software development has not changed its code integration practices. In particular, within the limits of this study, we claim that the practice of continuous integration has not yet significantly influenced the behavior of open source software developers.

Reference: In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2008). Springer Verlag, 2008. Page 273-280.

Available as a PDF file.

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How to Benefit From Open Source

Title: How to Benefit from Open Source

Presenter: Dirk Riehle

Institution: SAP Research, SAP Labs LLC

Abstract: Open source is changing the game of how software is built and how money is made. This talk analyzes the economics of open source software from three main perspectives: The system integrator perspective, the start-up firm perspective, and the individual software developer perspective. A focus is on the distinction between community open source and commercial open source, and how the different stakeholders use different approaches to win in the market, e.g. to gain market share or to keep a job. The dual-license strategy is explained as well as why committers to important open source software projects can expect a higher salary. The talk shows how every stakeholder can benefit and thereby explains why open source is here to stay.

Event/location: Software Engineering Today 2008 (SET 2008) in Zurich, May 6-7th 2008