Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 1. Software Industry

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
Please Help Keep our Language Precise: Single-Vendor Open Source is Neo-Proprietary Source, not Closed Source

When the Open Source Initiative defined open source, it focused only on the license, and ignored the process. Smart entrepreneurs quickly discovered that they could provide to the world their product as open source code and benefit from it, while strictly controlling the process to keep competition at bay. This is called single-vendor open source.…

2020-03-12
The ecosystem of openKONSEQUENZ, a user-led open source foundation [OSS 2020]

Companies without expertise in software development can opt to form consortia to develop open source software to meet their needs, as an alternative to the build-or-buy decision. Such user-led foundations are little understood, due to a limited number of published examples. In particular, almost nothing is known about the ecosystems surrounding user-led foundations. Our work…

2020-03-12
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
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.

2020-01-16