Software Research and the Industry

Commercial open source has a peculiar sales process. Frequently, when a firm decides to buy (license) a specific type of software like a content management system or a wiki engine, they’ll find that their company already employs multiple solutions, downloaded for free from the Internet. By some measures, this is dangerous to IT governance, as [...]

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Software researchers need case studies to validate new tools and methods of object-oriented software design. A good thing to do is to standardize on a set of open source frameworks and libraries that are known and available to everyone. Basically, a benchmark set for new tools and methods in object-oriented software design. JUnit and JHotDraw [...]

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Commercial open source firms go to market trying to create an “unfair” competitive advantage that lets them win customers more easily than their competitors. So do most other companies. Commercial open source firms do this by bypassing the traditional purchasing process by getting their software into customer companies for free, before the customers even know [...]

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Markus Völter of the Software Engineering Radio podcast show interviewed me about open source business models. Why not listen to the Open Source Business Model podcast while running rather than reading it as papers on my website?

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As a researcher, imprecise naming bothers me. The general confusion around the terms commercial open source, professional open source, and community open source warrants closer analysis.
First my proposal, then some litmus tests, followed by a bit of history.

Commercial open source is software provided as open source where a single legal entity owns the rights [...]

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I’m a founding member and associate editor of the International Journal of Open Source Software & Processes. Please consider submitting a paper to this new journal, call for papers appended.
CALL FOR PAPERS
International Journal of Open Source Software & Processes (IJOSSP)
An Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association - New in 2009
www.igi-global.com/ijossp
Editor-in-Chief: Stefan Koch, Vienna [...]

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Based on multiple requests, for the Total Growth of Open Source paper, we are providing a table of doubling times for the exponential models as well as semi-log scale graphs of the growth curves.

Table 1: Doubling times for the growth curves

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Title: The Total Growth of Open Source
Authors: Amit Deshpande, Dirk Riehle
Abstract: Software development is undergoing a major change away from a fully closed software process towards a process that incorporates open source software in products and services. Just how significant is that change? To answer this question we need to look at the overall growth [...]

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I’ll be moderating the experts panel on “Global Open Source Trends and Public Initiatives” at the half-day Global Open Source Conference on March 24th, 2008, in San Francisco. Panel participants are Mark Radcliffe of DLA Piper, Sander Ruiter from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Tony Wasserman of CMU West, and Arnaud Le Hors of [...]

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Title: Continuous Integration in Open Source Software Development
Authors: Amit Deshpande, Dirk Riehle
Abstract: Commercial software firms are increasingly using and contributing to open source software. Thus, they need to understand and work with open source software development processes. This paper investigates whether the practice of continuous integration of agile software development methods has had an impact [...]

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