Latest in Industry and Research Publications
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Historic periods in (single-vendor) commercial open source
While a comparatively young industry, the software industry nevertheless has a history, and taking from the playbook of other disciplines, understanding our history is important to understanding our future. So I want to ask: What (if any) historic periods are there in single-vendor open source firms? Please note that I’m asking about single-vendor open source…
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Inner source and financial compliance
Inner source is the use of open source practices within companies. Engineers generally love it, but any open-source-style collaboration across business unit boundaries will usually get stopped dead in its tracks by the financial compliance department. That’s because financial compliance is likely to worry that to the tax authorities such inner source collaboration will look…
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Open source community governance the Apache Way (Drost-Fromm & Tompkins, IEEE Computer)
I’m happy to report that the 14th article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. Title Open Source Community Governance the Apache Way Keywords Open Source Software, Distributed Computing, Documentation Authors Isabel Drost-Fromm, Apache Software Foundation; Rob Tompkins, Apache Software Foundation Publication Computer vol. 54, no. 4 (April 2021), pp. 70-75…
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What is an open source company?
An open source company is a company whose business model is built on a customer acquisition process in which customers first use a free-to-use open source version of the product before being upsold to a commercial offering by the company. When we talk about commercial open source firms, the word commercial is redundant, because all…
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How to make finding inner source projects easy
In 2006, we set-up SAP forge to make finding and collaborating on inner source projects easy. The advice of how to design a forge or portal for this purpose hasn’t really changed over the years. The most important advice is: Make the forge available at one place (and one place only) with a memorable URL…
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Research-to-startup for postdocs (5min. video for DAAD PRIME workshop)
This 5min. video discusses basics of turning your research into a startup. It focuses on public funding. The video was created for the March 2021 DAAD PRIME workshop, but is not restricted to a postdoc audience. Indeed, it works for anyone with a good idea and ideally a team who is willing to move to…