Wolfgang Mauerer

Wolfgang Mauerer is a professor of theoretical computer science at the Technical University Regensburg, and a senior key expert at Siemens Corporate Research, Competence Centre Embedded Linux. He serves on the technical steering committee of the Linux Foundation's Civil Infrastructure platform. His academic research deals with socio-technical software engineering, and the industrial use of open source. His speaking experience includes ELC, ABS, ELCE, OSSJ, OSSNA, and many other industrial and scientific conferences. He has written numerous books and articles on Linux and related topics.

Accepted Talks:

Are any big brothers watching you, and if yes, what can they tell about Debian?

Debian, as a collection of software packages and components, is known to be one of the largest software projects in the history of mankind. Combined with a traceable history over many years, the artefacts created by Debian developers and users make it one of science’s favourite targets to quantitatively or qualitatively understand how real-world software development works (or does not), how people collaborate, and many other other related questions.

Unfortunately, while scientists make ample use of the resources and artefacts created by FLOSS and friends, the exchange of insights and ideas does not seem to extend in both directions: Developers, users and integrators are often unaware of results obtained in science.

This talk will introduce the Debian community to a selection the most important results obtained by scientific (software engineering) research, with a special focus on large-scale socio-technical analysis of projects like Debian, and the possible implications and improvements these may bring to Debian development itself.