looking east

At LIFT08, Gen Kanai gave a very insightful talk about the state of open source in Asia. In his presentation, he mentions this interview with Linus Torvalds where Linus cites the following reasons for the low participation in open source in regions other than North America and Western Europe:

• Language
• Culture
• Education

Gen Kanai adds another factor this list:

• Economy

Language

Language is definitely a problem, at least from what I have seen in Thailand. However, even though Thai developers don’t tend to speak much English (probably they are just shy), they have a very good notion of written English. The same is valid for China. Hence, language as such is an issue, but probably not the main reason why open source contributions from Asia are scarce.

Culture

Culture is a big word. It can incluce pretty much anything, and it’s often very easy to say that culture is a problem. From what I have heard at the Linux Developer Symposium in Beijing, Gen Kanai’s talk at LIFT08, and some other sources, one main issue is considered to be the “direct” communication among community members. Mailinglist posts sometimes can be quite rude and it’s definitely not considered polite by Asian standards. However, it’s not considered polite by western standards either. Andrew Morton insisted at the Linux Developer Symposium on not taking these reactions too personal:

“The problem is, one person says something, and though not everyone agrees, nobody contradicts. Today it’s not as bad as it used to be, and it’s important not to forget: these people don’t speak for anybody else, they only speak for themselves.”

Although I do think that rudeness is a problem, I am not sure about how much this problem is related to culture. I mean, why are there only few women involved in software development in general and open source in particular? I think this is at least partly due to the fact that open source development is dominated by Western males. I believe that if more women were involved in open source, it would become more attractive for other women. The same holds for Asians. If they see that other Asians are involved, they will be more motivated to join. People tend to hang out with people who share common backgrounds and interests.

Education

I don’t agree with Linus in this point. He says that education is not a problem for Asia. However, I do believe it is a problem. Not education in a general term, but more specifically education in the sense of creating awareness about open source. It seems that open source as it is taught at universities in Thailand and China, is mainly concerned with how to make use of open source without mentioning communites, philosophy, and participation.

Now thinking back, when I was at university, I am quite sure that I didn’t hear about open source from a professor. It was all implicit. Most computers ran Linux, all software developed by the university was freely available online, everyone, including professors, assistants, and students simply lived open source. There was no need to explicitely teach us. What does that mean for Asia? Probably, universities in Asia (though I only can speak for Thailand and China), do not really “live”open source, the students therefore don’t have enough examples and don’t get inspired by the open source spirit. I don’t think Asia needs government support as it was discussed at the Linux Developer Symposium. I think all it needs are role models, individuals who are passionate about open source, who are actively involved in the community and who are motivating other people to do the same thing.

Economy

Economy is definitely a reason why companies don’t contribute to open source. Often, tight schedules, lack of human resources and so on will prevent them from doing so. Additionally, the traditional view of competition in the software sector continues to prevail in many parts of Asia, and the open source business model hasn’t reached many companies yet. I met some developers at the symposium who worked for companies which prohibited contributing code to open source. As, according to Jonathon Corbet, about 75 percent of the Linux kernel developers are doing their development as part of their job, this is a major issue. Moreover, working hours in some Asian companies tend to be very long for different, mostly “cultural” reasons. That means that the developers’ free time can be very short and does hardly allow them to participate in an open source project. I have also heard of cases in which companies actually claimed ownership for any code a developer produced while working for them. Hence, economy is probably the main reason for the low participation of Asia in open source.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 7:15 pm and is filed under asia, academic, computing, thoughts, community, sociology, technology, event, linux, geeks.