Latest in Industry and Research Publications
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Another take on explaining open source business models
Open source remains popular and I find myself explaining the economics of it to ever broader audiences. Rather than talking legalese or philosophy, I’ve been wondering about a pitch that focuses on the high-level strategic objective of the companies that are paying for open source. Here is a short summary; let me know if you…
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Student startup passion vs. market potential
As part of being a professor, I’m trying to motivate student startups. Here, I want to talk about student startups coming out of a Master’s program. These are different from startups coming out of my research lab, which are based on work with my Ph.D. students. Master student startups are typically smaller, not based on…
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Example login designed to make users go away
Schufa is a German credit rating agency. By law it is required to provide information to consumers (while it makes all its money, for now, off corporate customers). As a consequence, its password and login screens have been designed, I suggest, to be as unusable as possible. Below please find a screen-shot of the PIN…
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Tabs vs. spaces and cause vs. effect
Stack Overflow of the “full stackoverflow programmer” fame just published a developer survey. Among the items was a question asking developers, what they prefer for indenting their code: Tabs or spaces? The majority of developers prefers tabs over spaces by a reasonable margin. What worries me, though, is the conclusion or the “trend” that the…
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Founders vs. success vs. home-runs
A student of mine pointed me to this article about who founds companies. It is a well-known fact (or at least lore as I have no reference at hand) that the highest success rate as a founder is with those around age 40 (38 according to the article). At that age, a founder has worked…
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![The five stages of open source volunteering [Book Chapter]](https://dirkriehle.com/wp-content/uploads/featured/10399-fuerth-appworks-bathroom-300x150.jpg)
The five stages of open source volunteering [Book Chapter]
Abstract: Today’s software systems build on open source software. Thus, we need to understand how to successfully create, nurture, and mature the software development communities of these open source projects. In this article, we review and discuss best practices of the open source volunteering and recruitment process that successful project leaders are using to lead…