Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 1. Software Industry

  • There is no “donating code to the community”

    There is no “donating code to the community”

    There, he said it again, at the Open Source Meets Business conference in Nuremberg, Germany: “We would like to donate this code to the community.” Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, I’m not so sure. Or, to be frank, I think if somebody talks about donating code to the community they probably don’t understand effective open…

  • Six easy pieces of quantitatively analyzing open source projects

    Six easy pieces of quantitatively analyzing open source projects

    I’ll be giving a talk at the Open Source Business Conference 2009 in San Francisco on March 24, 2009. The talk will present an easily accessible summary of our data-driven analytical work on how open source software development works. Here is the abstract: For the first time in the history of software engineering, we can…

  • Open source labor economics…

    Open source labor economics…

    …is not nearly as sexy a title for an industry talk as is “Open Source Hacker Careers” so it had to go. The result you can observe at the 2009 Open Source Meets Business conference in Nuremberg, Germany, on January 28th, 2009, when I will be giving a talk (almost) so named. Open Source Software…

  • How open source comments (by programming language)

    How open source comments (by programming language)

    We recently looked at the commenting practice of active working open source projects. It is quite impressive: The average comment density of open source is around 19%. (Comment density is the percentage of text that are comments, or, more formally: comment density = comment lines / (comment lines + source code lines); for example, two…

  • The perils of going from community to commercial open source

    The perils of going from community to commercial open source

    The growth and corporate adoption of many community open source projects is hindered by the lack of commercial support. At the same time, well working community open source is a temptation for startups to make a buck by turning the community project into commercial open source. We can currently observe the unraveling of such a…

  • Capobianco’s OSS 2008 keynote

    Capobianco’s OSS 2008 keynote

    Fabrizio Capobianco made the slides from his OSS 2008 keynote available. This is the same conference where we reported about the total (exponential) growth of open source. Unfortunately I had to leave right after our talk for the Wiki Symposium so I didn’t catch him nor could I listen to his talk. His slides, however,…