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Podcast on Product Management and Commercial Open Source

Thomas Otter and Dave Kellogg of The SaaS Product Power Breakfast had me join their show and discuss product management, commercial open source, and cloud service strategies. It is out already as a podcast (local copy). Check it out and make sure to subscribe to their show!

Show notes

There were a couple of references in the show you might like to have the links to.

  1. The commercial open source course as taught at UC Santa Cruz, starting June 21st, 2021.
  2. Our Harvard business school type free teaching cases for product management.

If I missed a link, let me know, and I’ll add it.

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The Future Resurgence of Copyleft

In 2009, half of open source code was licensed under the GPLv2 license, the canonical copyleft license. Every other license had less than 10% market share. Over the years, the MIT license and other permissive licenses kept climbing at the expense of the GPLv2. As of today, the MIT license is the leading license with more than 32% market share in absolute numbers, with the GPLv2 license having fallen below 20%.

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Open Source Project Licensing

In a well-working community open source project, many people contribute. In particular, software developers will submit code contributions. As a consequence, without further measures, the copyright in the project’s code will be widely shared among its contributors. 

To ensure that a project can be used without fear of violating someone’s intellectual property rights, all project artifacts, in particular the code, need to have a clear open source license, and ideally only one. 

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Open Source Explained (in German, without Jargon, in 1500 Words)

Open-Source-Software, im engeren Sinne, ist Computer-Software (Programme), die kostenfrei genutzt, modifiziert, und weitergegeben werden können. Bekannte Beispiele für Open-Source-Software sind das Linux Betriebssystem und der Firefox Web-Browser. Open Source im weiteren Sinne ist ein von Menschen getragenes Phänomen, das uns ungeahnte Möglichkeiten der weltweiten Zusammenarbeit sowie neue Geschäftsmodelle gegeben hat.

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Creating and Growing Healthy Community Open Source Projects (PLoP ’20)

Abstract: This article presents a succinct and minimal handbook of best practices of how to create and grow community open source projects. We start with the assumption that the handbook’s user has a minimal but useful piece of software at hand that they want to open source and build a community around.

Keywords: Open source, open source projects, open source communities, creating open source projects, growing open source projects

Reference:  Riehle, D. (2020). Creating and Growing Community Open Source Projects. In Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP 2020). ACM, 14 pages.

The paper can be downloaded as a PDF file.

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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 like attempts at profit shifting.

Below, please find a 20min. presentation on inner source and transfer pricing that I prepared for a workshop at the German Ministry of Finance. It is aimed at non-technical people.

You can also skim the slides, though the video offers significantly more information. Feel free to shoot any questions you might have my way.