Latest Publications on Industry and Research
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Open source is a business strategy not a business model
Following up on related discussions, another common confusion in my opinion is to think that “open source” is a business model. It is not. Open source is a business strategy, in support of a business model. You still need to know how to make money, and it doesn’t happen by giving software away for free.…
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Design pattern density and design maturity
JUnit is a widely-adopted unit testing framework for Java, developed by Kent Beck and Erich Gamma. In their discussion of JUnit 3.8’s design, the authors state: Notice how TestCase, the central abstraction in the framework, is involved in four patterns. Pictures of mature object designs show this same ‘pattern density’. The star of the design…
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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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Object-oriented software design documentation
Software researchers need case studies to validate new tools and methods of object-oriented software design. A good thing to do is to standardize on a set of open source frameworks and libraries that are known and available to everyone. Basically, a benchmark set for new tools and methods in object-oriented software design. JUnit and JHotDraw…
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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?