Category: 1. Software Industry
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The Meaning of “Digitalization” 1/2
My engineering colleagues are sometimes sarcastic about the (many) on-going “digitalization” initiatives: “Didn’t we do this 20-30 years ago, when we switched from analog to digital?” I guess, they are talking about digitization, not about what is currently meant with “digitalization”. Different from digitization, today’s “digitalization” initiatives are about giving software an equal seat at…
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Reasons for why companies are getting serious about open source licenses 1/4
The times are changing: More and more companies are finally taking stock of the open source code embedded in their products. The main driver is to be (finally) compliant with the requirements of the licenses of the open source code. I see three main reasons for why companies are finally shaping up: Occasionally, due diligence…
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CeBIT Forum on “Open Source und Smart Services”
Today, I’ll be at the CeBIT Forum on open source and smart services to discuss business models based on open source and review a few examples, together with always fabulous Peter Ganten, CEO of Univention, a German Linux distributor. Catch me at 1pm today (2018-06-13) in room München (Munich) on the (CeBIT) Hannover Messegelände (i.e.…
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The Fiercer the Competition, the More Companies Open Source
How come that companies like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft are leading so much open source these days? How is it possible that they harmoniously (most of the time anyway) collaborate with each other at the Apache Software Foundation or even Linux Foundation, while they fight each other to the bone in front of the customer?
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Professors and Startups
My primary goal in becoming a professor was to turn my (hoped-for excellent) research and teaching into startups. For that reason I created the Startupinformatik program and set-up my teaching to support it. Sadly, I’ve been noticing over the years that things don’t seem to get easier but harder. Specifically, “the system” (I’ll explain below)…
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Slides for Keynote at Inner Source Commons Summit at Bosch
Today, I gave a keynote at the 2018 spring Inner Source Commons summit at Bosch, in Renningen, Germany. I talked about our experiences with ten years of inner source projects at the companies we have been working with. The slides are available as a PDF. The photo above is from the first keynote of the…