CeBIT 2010: Career Benefits of Open Source
Dr. Dirk Riehle is the first official open source college professor in Germany. At the Open Source Forum at CeBIT, the former businessman described the new career model.
"It's hard for me not to look at the economic context of open source," said the newly installed open source professor almost apologetically at the beginning of his Open Source: a New Developer Career talk at CeBIT. The difference between the classic developer and his new counterpart writing software for an organization is the quintessential "to earn versus to be recognized."
Riehle suggested that developers in the open source world for the most part have to prove "peer certification" apart from the obligatory technical and social skills. This is reflected, for example, in the project community's acceptance and implicit acknowledgment of upstream contributions. Open source developers can further build their reputations partly through contributions to source code and also by documenting their efforts on mailing lists. This transparency also has an advantage: the developer has a much higher likelihood of finding effective collaborators.
Riehle was named Professor of Open Source at the Computer Science Institute of the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nuremburg, Germany in 2009. In the 10 years prior to his academic calling he was in banking IT and worked among other things in the SAP realm.
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Gnome 47.2 Now Available
Gnome 47.2 is now available for general use but don't expect much in the way of newness, as this is all about improvements and bug fixes.
-
Latest Cinnamon Desktop Releases with a Bold New Look
Just in time for the holidays, the developer of the Cinnamon desktop has shipped a new release to help spice up your eggnog with new features and a new look.
-
Armbian 24.11 Released with Expanded Hardware Support
If you've been waiting for Armbian to support OrangePi 5 Max and Radxa ROCK 5B+, the wait is over.
-
SUSE Renames Several Products for Better Name Recognition
SUSE has been a very powerful player in the European market, but it knows it must branch out to gain serious traction. Will a name change do the trick?
-
ESET Discovers New Linux Malware
WolfsBane is an all-in-one malware that has hit the Linux operating system and includes a dropper, a launcher, and a backdoor.
-
New Linux Kernel Patch Allows Forcing a CPU Mitigation
Even when CPU mitigations can consume precious CPU cycles, it might not be a bad idea to allow users to enable them, even if your machine isn't vulnerable.
-
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5 Released
Notify your friends, loved ones, and colleagues that the latest version of RHEL is available with plenty of enhancements.
-
Linux Sees Massive Performance Increase from a Single Line of Code
With one line of code, Intel was able to increase the performance of the Linux kernel by 4,000 percent.
-
Fedora KDE Approved as an Official Spin
If you prefer the Plasma desktop environment and the Fedora distribution, you're in luck because there's now an official spin that is listed on the same level as the Fedora Workstation edition.
-
New Steam Client Ups the Ante for Linux
The latest release from Steam has some pretty cool tricks up its sleeve.