Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 1. Software Industry

Controlling and steering open source projects [Computer Magazine]

The IEEE just published a short version of the “control points and steering mechanisms” article. Here is the abstract. Please see the original for more details. Abstract: Open source software has become an important part of the software business. In a 2009 survey, Forrester Research found that 46 percent of all responding enterprises were using…

2011-07-18
The Evolution of the Source Forge Home Page

I was revising my talk on “Inner Source” when it occurred to me that it might be fun to review the changes to the sf.net (Sourceforge) homepage. Please find my collection of screenshots below. I only started saving them in 2007 so pointers to more and older screenshots are welcome! (In particular if they come…

2011-07-16
Upcoming Talk: The Open Source Volunteering Process

Title The Open Source Volunteering Process Abstract Open source projects critically depend on bringing new project members on board speedily and effectively. In this talk, I’ll describe the open source volunteering and on-boarding process. I’ll discuss the roles people play and the practices they follow, and I’ll illustrate how this process works by showing the…

2011-07-02
The Java IP Story

Every year, I teach the AMOS class, a lab course on “Agile Methods and Open Source” that combines lectures with a real software project that ideally turns into a startup (see the AMOS Project concept, in German). To explain open source, I have to introduce students to intellectual property rights, of which most have been…

2011-06-30
The Open Source Big Bang

Open source is not only software, but also an approach to software development. The public nature of open source projects lets us show how open source software development scales to the largest project sizes. The following figure illustrates the scalability of open source software development. I call it the big bang of open source. The…

2011-06-21
The Open Source Innovation and Commoditization Frontier

Following up on Matt Aslett’s excellent post about the growth of permissive licenses and a short discussion about it on my research group’s blog, I wanted to suggest here a thought about the ratio of new vendor-owned vs. community-owned open source projects. I’m ignoring existing projects because of their path dependence (read: only today do…

2011-06-20