The life-cycle of open source program offices
Open source program offices (OSPOs) have a life-cycle. Most companies start out with tasking one employee, part-time, “to take care of open source”. This person will typically try to help product and...
View ArticleA short history of open source business conferences
Out of curiosity about the recent resurgence of open source business conferences, here a short listing of those that I’m aware of. Feel free to add others in the comments. Name First year Founders...
View ArticleMy top three challenges for open source in Germany
Ahead of the next election and in support of the Bitkom open source working group and an upcoming policy paper, here are my top three challenges to open source in Germany. 1. Insufficient product...
View ArticleImproving velocity of code contributions in open source (Zaks et al., IEEE...
I’m happy to report that the 29th article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. Title Improving velocity of code contributions in open source Keywords Open Source, Open Source...
View ArticleThe societal value of commercial open source
The heat about recent relicensing in open source land has dissipated a bit. To recap in a nutshell what had people riled up: Venture-capital-backed startups increasingly went to market by providing...
View ArticleA plea for an open source cloud copyleft license
Is the AGPL-3.0 (or-later) license an effective cloud copyleft license? Does it do the trick of keeping community open source free and the competition away from commercial open source? I tried getting...
View ArticleFree and open-source software [Computer Magazine]
I’m happy to report that the 30th article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. With this article, I’m turning to open source fundamentals which I’ll write about if there is no...
View ArticleThe prisoner’s dilemma of open-source software security (Koch, IEEE Computer)
I’m happy to report that the 31st article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. Title The prisoner’s dilemma of open-source software security Keywords Open Source Software,...
View ArticleThe OPEN_Source-Initiative and the hyphen
Wikipedia is where linguists go when they are bored. So they long settled that it is “open source” (if used standalone) and “open-source software” (if open-source is a modifier/attribute to a noun)....
View ArticleStop maligning commercial open source, start helping it
You may have noticed how some open source enthusiasts are complaining about companies which relicensed their open source components to proprietary licenses. These companies get maligned using terms...
View ArticleWho gets to do velocity and burndown charts in Scrum?
In Scrum, velocity charts display the story points achieved in a given sprint, and a burndown chart displays the total size of features you expect to deliver in future sprints until the end of the...
View ArticleWhat to look for in startup co-founders and early employees
I have created and participated in several software product startups during my early industry career, and I have created and participated in several as a professor. I intend to do so for many more to...
View ArticleWhat is “open washing”?
The term “open washing” is a fighting term used by proponents of community open-source software against commercial open source companies. The goal is to shame the companies into changing their business...
View ArticleOpen source program offices [Computer Magazine]
I’m happy to report that the 32th article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. As always, please consider writing an article proposal! Title Open Source Program Offices...
View ArticleWhy do companies create and how do they succeed with a vendor‑led open source...
Abstract Vendor-led open source foundations are open source foundations led by software vendors rather than individual developers or end-user organizations. Our research investigates why vendors create...
View ArticleGovernance practices for open source foundations in the healthcare sector...
Abstract Open source (OS) foundations are non-profit organizations that support open-source software development projects. OS foundations can be categorized based on their membership and governance...
View Article“Two hard things in computer science” explained
You may have heard the saying “There are only two hard things in computer science: Cache invalidation and naming things.” The web and Martin Fowler attribute this saying to one Phil Karlton; I actually...
View ArticleWhy and how do organizations create user-led open source consortia? [INFSOF...
Abstract Context User-led open source (OS) consortia (foundations) consist of organizations from industries beyond the software industry collaborating to create open-source software solutions for their...
View ArticleOpen-source software: The ultimate in reuse or a risk not worth taking? (Mead...
I’m happy to report that the 33rd article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. As always, please consider writing an article proposal! Title Open-source software: The ultimate...
View ArticleAn empirical study of Jayvee, a domain-specific language for data...
Abstract A large part of data science projects is spent on data engineering. Especially in open data contexts, data quality issues are prevalent and are often tackled by non-professional programmers....
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