Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 1. Software Industry

  • Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess

    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,…

  • Single-Vendor Open Source Firms and Intellectual Property Strategies (Slides)

    Single-Vendor Open Source Firms and Intellectual Property Strategies (Slides)

    In this talk, I explain the single-vendor open source business model (also: multi-licensing, open core) and in particular its intellectual property strategies. This is the slide deck of a previously posted video. The deck is also available as a PDF for download.

  • Single-Vendor Open Source Firms and Intellectual Property Strategies (Video)

    Single-Vendor Open Source Firms and Intellectual Property Strategies (Video)

    In this video, I explain the single-vendor open source business model (also: multi-licensing, open core) and in particular its intellectual property strategies. This talk is partly a reaction to the recent licensing changes by commercial open source firms and the resulting confusion. An upcoming article will go into more detail next year. Next to the…

  • The First Derivative of Software is Eating the World

    The First Derivative of Software is Eating the World

    Marc Andreesen, venture capitalist at a16z, famously stated in 2011: Software is eating the world Wall Street Journal, 2011-08-11 Andreesen’s article describes the immediate impact of software, both as its own product category and as a component of increasing importance in existing (non-software) products. I want to discuss what I consider the first derivative of…

  • Open Source is an On-ramp to the Cloud

    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…

  • If Open Data is Like Open Source (20 Years Ago) 5/5: Inner Data

    If Open Data is Like Open Source (20 Years Ago) 5/5: Inner Data

    In five posts, I want to speculate about the next twenty years of open data based on the past twenty years of open source. The idea is to transfer what we learned from open source in one way or another to open data. This is part 5 on inner data, that is, the collaborative creation…