Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 1. Software Industry

  • Commercial open source in the cloud

    Commercial open source in the cloud

    Update 2018-10-16: MongoDB is facing the same problem and decided to go closed source, see the press release. The brouhaha around Redis Labs taking some enterprise modules of its popular open source in-memory database Redis closed source has somewhat calmed down. However, I didn’t see any discussion of what I thought was the most interesting…

  • If GitHub was like Berlin…

    If GitHub was like Berlin…

    Much open source research assumes that all open source projects are alike and that if you take enough of them, you can claim generalizability for your conclusions. GitHub is the main source of such mischief, because of its size and availability. If GitHub was like Berlin, and projects on GitHub were like the people of…

  • Classifying open source user consortia

    Classifying open source user consortia

    An open source software user consortium is a non-profit organization (foundation, consortium, working group) created for the purpose of funding and managing the development of non-differentiating open source software made available to foundation members and the general public. Its purpose is to establish a software ecosystem in which vendors and suppliers can provide products and…

  • Uncovering the periphery: A qualitative survey of episodic volunteering in free/libre and open source software communities [TSE Journal]

    Uncovering the periphery: A qualitative survey of episodic volunteering in free/libre and open source software communities [TSE Journal]

    Abstract: Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities are composed, in part, of volunteers, many of whom contribute infrequently. However, these infrequent volunteers contribute to the sustainability of FLOSS projects, and should ideally be encouraged to continue participating, even if they cannot be persuaded to contribute regularly. Infrequent contributions are part of a trend which…

  • Paid vs. volunteer open source work in China (projects) 3 / 3

    Paid vs. volunteer open source work in China (projects) 3 / 3

    We just finished redoing our original analysis of paid vs. volunteer work in open source for Gitee, a Chinese-dominated code hosting platform from China. We wanted to understand where China stands in open source. Previous blog posts looked at base data, e.g. the half/half split between paid and volunteer work, as well as developer behavior,…

  • Paid vs. volunteer open source work in China (developers) 2 / 3

    Paid vs. volunteer open source work in China (developers) 2 / 3

    We just finished redoing our original analysis of paid vs. volunteer work in open source for Gitee, a Chinese-dominated code hosting platform from China. We wanted to understand where China stands in open source. The previous blog post explained the half / half split between paid vs. volunteer time in terms of total work on…