By his own description, Dirk Riehle is a major fan of open source software. Riehle, leader of the open source research group at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, California, spends countless hours theorizing about the economics of this emerging software trend.
He’s the author of The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software, a scholarly article that describes significant shifts in the software business. Datamation spoke with him about how these shifts are shaping the pay levels of open source developers.