Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 1.2 Open Source (Industry)

The innovations of open source article republished in IEEE Computing Edge’s April 2020 issue

IEEE’s Computing Edge magazine is a practitioner-oriented publication that republishes particularly popular content from other IEEE publications. In the April 2020 issue, they republished last year’s The Innovations of Open Source article that I wrote to open IEE Computer magazine’s bimonthly open source column. Best of all, it is free! (Original version, local copy.) I…

2020-04-14
Managing episodic volunteers in free/libre, and open-source software communities [TSE Journal]

Abstract We draw on the concept of episodic volunteering (EV) from the general volunteering literature to identify practices for managing EV in free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) communities. Infrequent but ongoing participation is widespread, but the practices that community managers are using to manage EV, and their concerns about EV, have not been previously documented. We…

2020-04-10
An Analysis of Copyleft Compliance Behavior

It is the year 2020 and my Twitterverse and other professional time sinks are still full of … comments about Copyleft. So for the first time ever, I decided to venture into that pit. I see four observable behaviors when it comes to complying with copyleft. Kickin’ and screamin’ No use Dump and run Enlightened…

2020-03-10
Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess

Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are encoded in all valid open source licenses, next to the obligations one has to fulfill to receive the rights grant. Recently,…

2020-02-27
Open Source is an On-ramp to the Cloud

I was surprised to hear the other day that “the cloud is killing open source”. I thought we settled that one ten years ago. Nothing could be further from the truth: Open source and cloud computing work together well. From a commercial open source business model perspective, open source is the on-ramp to a cloud…

2019-12-02
Open source is not free (nor is free software)

Later this week I’ll be on a panel at the Automotive Computing Conference in Frankfurt. The organizers sent the questions in advance, and sure enough, they were asking how open source could provide viable software components if it is free (of cost). This perhaps is the most common commercial misconception about open source. Open source…

2019-10-21