Software Research and the Industry
Research publications and comments on the software industry, open source, and inner source
I give industry talks about every other week and stopped advertising them long ago. This one, however, may be of broad interest. I will talk about the economics of strategically creating and leading open source projects at the June 20th, 2017, Open Source Forum of Bitkom in Berlin. Title and abstract below, event details to …
Preparing for the relaunch of my course on free/libre, and open source software, I took stock of the general-interest papers I wrote about open source. From this list, I’m omitting (overly) academic papers; all of these papers should be broadly understandable. Introduction to Open Source Riehle, Dirk; Riemer, Philipp; Kolassa, Carsten; Schmidt, Michael (2014). Paid …
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Abstract: Software developers with open source project experience acquire verifiable technical expertise, peer-certified competencies, and positional power—advantages that align with companies’ need to obtain a competitive advantage. Read more… Keywords: Software developer career, software labor economics, high-tech labor market, open source, inner source Reference: Dirk Riehle. “How Open Source is Changing the Software Developer’s Career.” …
Continue reading “How Open Source is Changing the Software Developer’s Career [Computer Magazine]”
A progress report towards an open source foundation for the energy sector (in German) that I initiated and am currently guiding. The article dates back to February already, but I got a hold of it only now. Konsortiale Open-Source-Softwareentwicklung im Energiesektor Christof Heinritz, Peter Herdt, Stephan Janeck, Gerhardt Regenbogen, Dirk Riehle, Frank Rose, Michael Roth, …
Continue reading “Open Source for the Energy Sector (in German) [ew Magazine]”
Please note: This is the original of a copy-edited article that appeared in IEEE Computer in May of 2015. See here for the official publication, including a PDF. Dirk Riehle, dirk@riehle.org, https://dirkriehle.com Professur für Open-Source-Software, Computer Science Department Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Abstract Open source software development is changing the labor market for software developers. Benefits …
Continue reading “The Open Source Software Developer Career and Its Benefits”
I was revising my talk on “Inner Source” when it occurred to me that it might be fun to review the changes to the sf.net (Sourceforge) homepage. Please find my collection of screenshots below. I only started saving them in 2007 so pointers to more and older screenshots are welcome! (In particular if they come …
Continue reading “The Evolution of the Source Forge Home Page”
Open source is not only software, but also an approach to software development. The public nature of open source projects lets us show how open source software development scales to the largest project sizes. The following figure illustrates the scalability of open source software development. I call it the big bang of open source.
Citable reference (including PDF file) Most commercial software today depends on open source software. The commercial software might be using an underlying open source platform, or it might be incorporating open source components, or it might be provided as a commercial open source product itself. Whichever the case, the software firm behind the commercial software …
Continue reading “Control Points and Steering Mechanisms in Open Source Software Projects”
How we develop open source software can vary widely from project to project. However, the roles we play are similar across projects: user, developer, tester, documenter, committer, etc. For a while now, I have been interested in what open source means for software developer careers, in particular with respect to fame and fortune. The figure …
In tech companies, startups and large companies alike, of the many roles you need to define, two seem to be particularly confusing to German startups: The CTO and the VP of Engineering role. Many German startups I’ve seen simply have a person titled CTO who does both (and sometimes neither). These two roles are very …