Best of OSR Group 2011 and Before

2012-02-02

Teaching

The AMOS Project (AMOS)

The AMOS project is our annual lab course used to teach agile methods and open source. It is also our incubator for new software startups, see the AMOS project concept (in German).

Product Management (PROD)

Product management is a key business function of software vendors, yet it is rarely taught in school. We are taking a fresh new start with Harvard Business School-type cases (in German).

Research: Engineering Tools

End-user Programming with Sweble

We take a wiki-style approach to end-user programming, trying to help those people who earn their living by programming, yet have no or little formal programming education. See the Sweble project.

Software Forge

Anyone engaged with open source needs a software forge. Whether in-house as part of Inner Source or facing the public, to enrich one’s ecosystem, we are trying to help you do it better.

Research: Engineering Processes

Inner Source

Large software organizations can improve code reuse and knowledge sharing by adding bottom-up open source practices to top-down project management. We have done it. And keep doing it.

Governance / Compliance

We identified risks of using open source in closed source products and are developing a handbook of best practices for open source governance. We work with Bearing Point and others on this.

Research: Business Models

Single-Vendor Open Source

How did MySQL get to a $1B valuation? We are analysing best practices of dual-licensing and open core models and are capturing them as part of a handbook for future use.

Open Source Distributors

How are SUSE and Red Hat doing it? We analyse the production process of distributors on many dimensions, for example, how to manage open source investments.

Developer Foundations

Apache and Eclipse are two examples of successful open source developer foundations. But there are many more in industry verticals, for example. Just how to get it right? (In German.)

User Foundations

IT User Foundations are consortia of IT user firms who join forces to sponsor the development of non-competitively differentiating software components. This is the hot topic of 2012. Stay tuned!

Policy Implications

Developer Careers

We have long talked about how the world changes for open source software developers. A country like Germany would benefit from having more committers to key open source software projects.