discovering asian technology
Yay, I made it to Barcamp Bangkok 2! It was absolutely great, best barcamp ever: 400+ people, amazing talks and discussions, thai food, free beer, cool T-shirts, and funky stickers. Thank you so much to the organisers and sponsors for making this event happen.
Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera, so here just a few links:
The next Beijing Open Party will take place on July 19th at the Thoughtworks offices in Beijing. If you want to give a talk, you can propose it on the Beijing Open Party google group. Alternatively you can also just show up at the party and propose your topic. The party’s original announcement can be found here.
Event: BeijingOpenParty July: Summer Daydreams (仲夏梦舞)
Date: July 19th
Time: 13.30 - 17.30
Address: Room 1105, 11th Floor GuoHua Plaza, No.3 Dongzhimen South Street, Dongcheng District, Beijing, China, 100007, see map.
Here a few impression of last weekend’s coding for fun event at Exoweb, unfortunately I didn’t take many pics.
Technologies applied included: Pike, OpenGL, Flash, Chipmunk, Twitter, cURL, Festival, C, Boarduino, Arduino, LED, and many more.
Update: Martin has offered me to add his pics to my flickr account. Thanks, Martin :).
We would like to invite you to a weekend of coding for fun at the Exoweb offices in Beijing on June 28/29. The event is an experiment in which we are trying to bring together developers in an informal way to encourage them to share their projects and coding experience. So, it’s basically like a Hackathon. Everyone brings in their computer and hacks on their own code. People could also give short presentations or demos of their current projects if they want. And if you don’t have anything to hack on you may just look around and watch or join others.
Registration: here
Time: 11am - open end
Date: Saturday and Sunday, June 28/29th, 2008
Location: Exoweb office, Tianshuiyuan Shangwu Zhongxin A-505, 2 - Tianshuiyuan Dongjie, Jintai Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing
Map: here
Yesterday I attended my first Beijing Open Party, a monthly techie unconference event which takes place at the offices of ThoughtWorks here in Beijing. It’s similar to Barcamp, and it’s great fun. This was the first time they were proposing an English track, however, there was only one presentation in English yesterday. Topics ranged from Django over programming in different languages to event-driven architectures and StarDict. About 60-80 (estimation varying depending on who I talked to) people attended the event.
The party started with a stand-up in which everyone introduced themselves, and a presentation on NGO work after the earthquake in Sichuan. After the intro, people were asked to propose their topics, and give a quick talk about what they were going to present. Presentations took place in four different rooms, and there was a total of 12 talks.
I don’t know yet when the next Beijing Open Party will take place, but I will post it here as soon as I find out.
Yesterday, the Quadcopter group of the Beijing LUG met at the Exoweb office to assemble the pieces of the boarduino microcontrollers. We had lots of fun, and I learned a great deal about hardware, soldering, resistors, LED’s, analog, and digital pins, as well as microchips. Although the Quadcopter group’s final goal is to build a quadcopter, the microcontrolles we built yesterday were rather an educational experiment in which we tried to understand the internals of the boarduino.
The boarduino is an Open Source arduino clone which can run the same software as the arduino. Unfortunately, we didn’t succeed in loading the bootloader to the chip yesterday, so we will need to wait for next time to start programming.
Exoweb shows a strong commitment to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), most of the computers run Linux, much of the software developed is based on Python’s Django framework, and a few people are actively involved in Open Source projects. One of my tasks at Exoweb is to strengthen the relations between Exoweb and the FOSS communities by encouraging FOSS-related activities, and finding ways for Exoweb to collaborate with the communities.
The Open Source Business Model
I was invited to a discussion about Open Source in China at the Programmer magazine two weeks ago, and one of the things I learned was that companies trying to build on FOSS don’t seem to be very successful in China, and many of them are struggling for survival. One of their main worries is how to actually make money with Open Source. Of course it is true that if a company wants to build a completely new FOSS product, it would be hard to find a way to finance the development.
However, as the Exoweb example shows, you don’t really need to start with a new product, but you could just build your business based on existing FOSS software. In that case, the company doesn’t need to invest in product development at all, but can immediately start their business by customising an existing product for the needs of their customers. This is one of the main reasons why the FOSS business model has proved to be so successful in the West.
Contributing Back
Using FOSS products is an excellent way to get started. And once you have become fairly familiar with the internals of the products you are using, you will might start building your own reusable components based on the existing software. You might also discover bugs, fix them, and send patches to the community. As this will improve your final product you are building for a client, the time spent on building components and patches can be, at least partly, covered by the customer’s mandate. Of course, the client has to agree to that, especially if the code is being published with an Open Source license.
However, contributing to FOSS might in many cases require more time than just writing the code for a specific project. The patch has to be documented and packaged according to the the FOSS project’s standards, and the the reusable components have to be maintained and improved to guarantee future reusability. While one can easily understand the reasons for contributing back a patch, questions might arise as for the components to be open sourced or not. In some cases, like Linux which is based on GPL, developers are in theory constrained by the original project’s license. Though despite this fact, I strongly doubt that the GPL could be enforced in China.
There could be other reasons for a company to open source a component’s or extension’s code: Maintenance and marketing. When the company is the only owner and developer of the extension, they will be forced to change the code whenever they decide to upgrade to a newer version of the original product. In an Open Source world, however, there might be other developers interested in maintaining the code, or even better, the code is added to the project’s core and is thus maintained by the community. Additionally, creating and maintaining Open Source code can have a considerable marketing effect for the company.
Exoweb and the FOSS World
Exoweb is trying to actively engage in the Django and Python community, as well as other local communities like the Beijing Linux User Group (BLUG). They have hosted the Django Sprint in Beijing in December last year, and are currently planning other similar events. Additionally, some of the teams are developing extensions which they want to add to Django’s contribution repository, and a few developers are working on their own FOSS projects. In order to encourage it’s employees, Exoweb additionally offers a 10 per-cent time during which everyone is free to work on whatever they want. Exoweb also offers hosting for internal FOSS projects on contrib.exoweb.net.
“Patch hoarding” refers to not committing kernel changes to the kernel trunk which has been a constant issue in the Linux community. At the CELF Embedded Linux Conference last week, Andrew Morton explained the why companies and developers should commit their changes to the kernel:
“One of the areas that he is most concerned about is the practice of “patch hoarding”—holding on to kernel changes as patches without submitting them upstream to the kernel hackers. It is hopefully only due to a lack of resources, but he has heard that some are doing it to try and gain a competitive advantage. This is simply wrong, he said, companies have a ‘moral if not legal obligation‘ to submit those patches.
There are many good reasons for getting code merged upstream that Morton outlined. The code will be better because of the review done by the kernel hackers; once it is done, the maintenance cost falls to near zero as well. He also touted the competitive advantage, noting that getting your code merged means that you have won—competing proposals won’t get in. Being the first to merge a feature can make it easier on yourself and harder on your competition.
There are downsides to getting your code upstream as well. Most of those stem from not getting code out there early enough for review. The kernel developers can ask for significant changes to the code especially in the area of user space interfaces. If a company already has lots of code using the new feature and/or interface, it could be very disruptive; ‘sorry, there’s no real fix for that except getting your code out early enough‘.
Another downside that companies may run into is with competitors being brought into the process. Morton and other kernel hackers will try to find others who might have a stake in a new feature to get them involved so that everybody’s needs are taken into account. This can blunt the “win” of getting your feature merged. Some are also concerned that competitors will get access to the code once it has been submitted; ‘tough luck’ Morton said, ‘everything in the kernel is GPL’.”
Read the full story on LWN.net here.
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:
Gen Kanai adds another factor this list:
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.
Linux Developer Symposium China 2008 was really cool. I got to meet plenty of people including Chinese Linux developers, members of the BLUG, and the Linux Foundation.
The conference started off with a full day of talks, followed by a second day with discussions. Topics included everything Linux, like File System, Desktop, Mobile Linux, and Linux Challenges for the future. A large number of talks and discussions were actually concerned with mobile Linux, a topic that is of interest to a large number of people and companies in China. Another recurring issue were device drivers and their integration into the Linux public kernel. This, of course, has been a central topic in the Linux community for a while, and it seems that quite a few companies in China are maintaining their own device drivers privately without contributing them to the public kernel, even though this would considerably decrease long-term maintenance costs.
There is plenty happening in terms of Open Source in China. At the conference, many of the large software companies were present and showed considerable interest in China and Open Source. However, even despite government support and business representations, there seems to be only little contribution to Open Source projects in China so far. This will probably be changing and I believe that we will see some quite impressive Open Source stuff going on in China in the near future.