Dirk Riehle

The governance of a pure community project are those rules and practices that the project has given itself, implicitly or explicitly, as practiced by the members of the community. The governance of a foundation-hosted project are those rules and practices defined by the foundation, possibly enhanced by additional informal rules and practices of the specific project. A corporate foundation-hosted project has added to the general governance required by the foundation its own formally structured and recognized governance; it has been written down and is formally supported and hence legally actionable. The CNCF provides added formal governance rules and practices to its projects like Kubernetes, thereby extending and refining the general governance of the LF for its corporate foundation-hosted projects.

We used to ask students in advance of their Master thesis whether we have their permission to use their work in our projects and this never was a problem, until now. Apparently based on recent proceedings, our legal department has instructed all professors not to ask students beforehand whether we can use their work, but only after the Master project finished and the grade has been announced. My Ph. D. students often work side-by-side with their Master’s students, integrating their code many times a week into the overall project’s code base. This opens us up to the problem that a student may say no to us using their work so that we have to remove it from our code base before we can continue.

Along with this comes the request that basic research funding should be provided by the country (because few companies would ever pay for it) before industry kicks in and supports applied research. I have found it much easier to approach industry with a relevant research question and get funding for it when the question is not fully vetted yet. This only makes sense: In engineering, industry is usually not willing to pay for controlled experiments or the like as the necessarily reductive nature of such methods is of little interest in the mostly qualitative world of engineering processes. In this approach, the industry funded research gives us the time, money, and perspective to write a public grant proposal for its validation.

I recently was interviewed about open source in the public sector and blogged my answers here: Should the public sector use open source software? Should the public sector consider open source only for new purchases? Shouldn’t a public government stay out of the software market?