Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Tag: Evergreen

  • The Open Source Innovation and Commoditization Frontier

    Following up on Matt Aslett’s excellent post about the growth of permissive licenses and a short discussion about it on my research group’s blog, I wanted to suggest here a thought about the ratio of new vendor-owned vs. community-owned open source projects. I’m ignoring existing projects because of their path dependence (read: only today do…

  • The single-vendor commercial open source business model [Book Chapter]

    The single-vendor commercial open source business model [Book Chapter]

    Update 2012-01-28: Springer changed the citation. The reference below reflects this. Springer just republished our 2009 article on how vendor-owned open source works, again. Here is the abstract: Abstract: Single-vendor commercial open source software projects are open source software projects that are owned by a single firm that derives a direct and significant revenue stream…

  • Control points and steering mechanisms in open-source software projects

    Control points and steering mechanisms in open-source software projects

    Following up on my Lisog talk earlier this month, I was asked to write up the talk’s content. So here we go, my analysis of what commercial open source firms do to manage or steer open source projects they depend on. Abstract: Most commercial software today depends on open source software. The commercial software might…

  • Community Open Source as the Raw Material of Computing Utility Providers

    It’s April 2nd, so the Apache Software Foundation’s 2010 April Fools’ joke is over. Here is why I liked it a lot. It represents a hypothetical: What if the ASF and its projects could be bought? Or, if not bought, then put under control or strong influence of corporate interests like in traditional open source…

  • Three Areas of Open Source Economics

    These days, I get involved in a lot of discussions about open source economics. Usually, they lead to an invitation to present our research and clarify “how open source works” to the audience. I’ve found it helpful to distinguish these three rather different areas of open source economics: (1) direct profits, (2) public welfare, (3)…

  • Open Source Vendor Lock-in

    Yesterday, SAP’s CTO Vishal Sikka called for a more open approach to the Java standardization process (JCP), asking SUN to stop ruling it with a heavy hand. Not surprisingly, he got some pushback using the argument that SAP isn’t one to talk about being more open, given its slow involvement with open source. I don’t…