Letter to Industry Partners 2020-06

Welcome to this newsletter from the Professorship of Open Source Software!

  1. Upcoming talks on commercial open source
  2. Call for participation in remote work research
  3. Call for participation in interview study on microservices
  4. Is your product legally defective?
  5. Subscribe / unsubscribe

1. Upcoming talks on commercial open source

Starting Nov 4th, 2020, we will be teaching a new course on commercial open source software (COSS). COSS is replacing our prior software product management and general open source software courses. We are inviting industry speakers to talk about their commercial open source experiences, and these talks will be open to the public. Please see the course schedule (tab schedule) or watch the announcements category on our blog. Among others, Thomas Otter of Otter Advisory will be speaking about software vendors and product management, Cornelius Schumacher of DB Systel will be talking about community open source, Andrew Randall of Kinvolk will be talking about his commercial open source startup experiences, and Florian Leibert of 468 Capital will be talking about how he is taking his Silicon Valley venture capital firm to Germany and how to raise funds.

2. Call for participation in remote work research

Since the first corona lockdown in March 2020 we have been studying the challenges of remote work (work from home) in software development. Currently, we are looking for people who want to participate in our online survey. The only requirements for participation are: working in software development or a related area and working (at least partly) from home due to the corona crisis. With your participation you are not only supporting our research but also a Corona aid project. The survey takes about 15 minutes and you can access it under this link. Thank you a lot for participating and sharing!

3. Call for participation in interview study on microservices

We are currently looking for experienced architects, project managers, and developers who want to share their experiences with integrating microservices with us. Our research aims to identify industry best practices of microservice integration, which are key for any successful microservice-based project. If you are interested, please let us know by submitting this form. We will be in touch then for an interview and you will be the among the first to hear about the results of our research.

4. Is your product legally defective?

Recent (yet unpublished) research of ours shows that about half of the projects we analyzed on Github declared a license that is not the actual license as found in the code. In particular, permissively licensed components often hide Copyleft-licensed code inside. As a consequence, software products which use these open source components and assume the declared license is correct, are legally defective. We are working on a commercial service that lets you submit a bill-of-materials (list of open source components in your product) and will tell you whether the declared licenses of these components is correct.

5. Subscribe / unsubscribe

Sie können unter https://forms.gle/vwXuQCgknoJnLakLA Ihre Interessen hinterlegen oder sich aus dem Newsletter austragen lassen. Gern können Sie sich auch direkt an mich wenden.


Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Dirk Riehle