Category: 1. Software Industry
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FOSSBazaar: Open source under the CIO’s radar screen: Good or bad?
Commercial open source has a peculiar sales process. Frequently, when a firm decides to buy (license) a specific type of software like a content management system or a wiki engine, they’ll find that their company already employs multiple solutions, downloaded for free from the Internet. By some measures, this is dangerous to IT governance, as…
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SDN: Is open source competing unfairly?
Commercial open source firms go to market trying to create an “unfair” competitive advantage that lets them win customers more easily than their competitors. So do most other companies. Commercial open source firms do this by bypassing the traditional purchasing process by getting their software into customer companies for free, before the customers even know…
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SE Radio interview on open source business models
Markus Völter of the Software Engineering Radio podcast show interviewed me about open source business models. Why not listen to the Open Source Business Model podcast while running rather than reading it as papers on my website?
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Commercial, professional, and community open source: Resolving the naming confusion
As a researcher, imprecise naming bothers me. The general confusion around the terms commercial open source, professional open source, and community open source warrants closer analysis. First my proposal, then some litmus tests, followed by a bit of history. Commercial open source is software provided as open source where a single legal entity owns the…
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Addendum to Total Growth of Open Source Paper
Based on multiple requests, for the Total Growth of Open Source paper, we are providing a table of doubling times for the exponential models as well as semi-log scale graphs of the growth curves. Table 1: Doubling times for the growth curves
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![The total growth of open source [OSS 2008]](https://dirkriehle.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/10653-berlin-bahnhof-zoo-platform-300x150.png)
The total growth of open source [OSS 2008]
Authors: Amit Deshpande, Dirk Riehle Abstract: Software development is undergoing a major change away from a fully closed software process towards a process that incorporates open source software in products and services. Just how significant is that change? To answer this question we need to look at the overall growth of open source as well…