Latest in Industry and Research Publications

Please Help Keep our Language Precise: Single-Vendor Open Source is Neo-Proprietary Source, not Closed Source

When the Open Source Initiative defined open source, it focused only on the license, and ignored the process. Smart entrepreneurs quickly discovered that they could provide to the world their product as open source code and benefit from it, while strictly controlling the process to keep competition at bay. This is called single-vendor open source.…

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2020-03-12

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1. Software Industry, 1.5 Commercial Open Source
Challenges of tracking and documenting open source dependencies in products [OSS 2020]

Software vendors need to manage the dependencies of the open source components used in their products. Without this management, license compliance would be impossible, export restrictions could not be maintained, and security vulnerabilities would remain unknown to the vendor. The management of these dependencies has grown in an ad-hoc fashion in most companies. As such,…

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2020-03-12

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2. Building Products, 2.3 Open Source (Building)
The ecosystem of openKONSEQUENZ, a user-led open source foundation [OSS 2020]

Companies without expertise in software development can opt to form consortia to develop open source software to meet their needs, as an alternative to the build-or-buy decision. Such user-led foundations are little understood, due to a limited number of published examples. In particular, almost nothing is known about the ecosystems surrounding user-led foundations. Our work…

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2020-03-12

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1. Software Industry, 1.4 Open Source Foundations
An Analysis of Copyleft Compliance Behavior

It is the year 2020 and my Twitterverse and other professional time sinks are still full of … comments about Copyleft. So for the first time ever, I decided to venture into that pit. I see four observable behaviors when it comes to complying with copyleft. Kickin’ and screamin’ No use Dump and run Enlightened…

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2020-03-10

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1. Software Industry, 1.2 Open Source (Industry)
Pattern discovery and validation using scientific research methods [Technical Report]

Abstract: Pattern discovery, the process of discovering previously unrecognized patterns, is usually performed as an ad-hoc process with little resulting certainty in the quality of the proposed patterns. Pattern validation, the process of validating the accuracy of proposed patterns, has rarely gone beyond the simple heuristic of “the rule of three”. This article shows how…

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2020-03-05

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3. Research and Teaching, 3.2 Research Methods
Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess

Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are encoded in all valid open source licenses, next to the obligations one has to fulfill to receive the rights grant. Recently,…

Posted on

2020-02-27

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1. Software Industry, 1.2 Open Source (Industry)