Latest in Industry and Research Publications
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Open source license compliance in mobile apps
Open source license compliance is not for the faint of heart. Among many things, a company needs to tell the recipients of a distribution which open source software is used in their products. In the case of mobile apps, free or not, the user is the recipient and the app is the distribution. Downloading an…
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Why I don’t teach a traditional software architecture course (any longer)
tl;dr The software development contexts that I deal most with these days are open source projects and fast-moving startups; both don’t seem to have much use for what is traditionally taught in software architectures courses. Let me start by saying that I love a good software architecture as well as software architecture in general. My…
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Some argue that dual-licensing in commercial open source indicates a lack of ability to provide superior service
This is obviously wrong. The use of dual licensing and the ability to provide superior service for open source are unrelated forms of competitive advantage, and without further circumstances, a business should exploit both advantages. Let me explain. Dual (or multiple) licensing is a strategy, in which a company develops software, releases it under an…
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The dancing robot dog: Magic trick or real artificial intelligence?
You may have seen the video below by Boston Dynamics. It shows a robot dog dancing to Uptown Funk by Bruno Mars. It is fun and funny to watch, but people also expressed serious worries about robot inroads into human behavior. However, there is no explanation by Boston Dynamics and it is not at all…
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What’s wrong in software product line engineering? The separation of the platform as a cost center from the product units as profit centers
In three previous posts I had reported about our research into problems with product line engineering. Three important specific problems (of several more) were: In all three cases (and then some), the underlying problem was the separation of the platform organizational unit as a cost center from the product organizational units as profit centers. Product…
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What’s wrong in software product line engineering? Political power play between product units
In previous blog posts we identified as causes for problems in software product line engineering. Of several more, I want to pick a third and final one, before we turn to the root cause of it all in the next blog post. This third cause is the political power play between product units as they…