Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 1. Software Industry

  • Comments on the state of open source in Germany (in German)

    Comments on the state of open source in Germany (in German)

    A German trade magazine for IT professionals just published an article on the state of open source (in German). Yours truly and many others are featured in there, commenting (or lamenting) on how Germany needs to catch-up on open source, a propellant of digitization, as the author notes.

  • Too many points of failure (at Theranos)

    Too many points of failure (at Theranos)

    I just finished reading John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood, which presents the story of the rise and fall of one-time Silicon Valley unicorn Theranos through his eyes as the journalist who broke the story. In case you missed it: Theranos was a healthcare company promising to sell a machine that could perform quickly and reliably…

  • The Innovations of Open Source colloquium talk at University of Hamburg

    The Innovations of Open Source colloquium talk at University of Hamburg

    Update 2019-01-30: The talk slides and a video recording (local copy) are available now. I got invited and will be presenting a talk in the colloquium of the computer science department at the University of Hamburg tomorrow, January 28th, 2019, at 17:00 Uhr. The talk topic are the innovations of open source and I will present…

  • Why do episodic volunteers stay in FLOSS communities? [ICSE 2019]

    Why do episodic volunteers stay in FLOSS communities? [ICSE 2019]

    Abstract: Successful Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects incorporate both habitual and infrequent, or episodic, contributors. Using the concept of episodic volunteering (EV) from the general volunteering literature, we derive a model consisting of five key constructs that we hypothesize affect episodic volunteers’ retention in FLOSS communities. To evaluate the model we conducted a…

  • Should a public government stay out of the software market? 4/4

    Should a public government stay out of the software market? 4/4

    This is the last of four questions posed to me by a journalist about open source and the public sector. The original question was: If a government develops open source software, it becomes a vendor of that software. Shouldn’t a public government stay out of such business? A public government that develops or sponsors the…

  • Should the public sector consider open source only for new purchases? 3/4

    Should the public sector consider open source only for new purchases? 3/4

    This is the third of four questions posed to me by a journalist about open source and the public sector. The economists have an answer for this. At any point in time should you evaluate the total life-time value of the various alternatives at hand and then chose the one that has the best value.…