Does It Matter Where Open Source is Based? 100
munchola writes "CBR has created a map of current open source software providers that contradicts the recent assertion of Alfresco's Matt Asay that "open source is not a Silicon Valley phenomenon". That statement has prompted a debate about the importance of location, involving Asay, Robert Scoble, and Dana Blankenhorn. A closer look shows that open source is very much a Silicon Valley phenomenon."
Makes no sense to me (Score:5, Informative)
Right here (Score:5, Informative)
Like this [debian.org]?
Re:One enormous flaw... (Score:3, Informative)
Now, as so many people pointed out, the map shows vendors, not developers, so the map doesn't actually do much to answer that question. Can anyone offer some insight?
Not only vendors, but as people have also pointed out the map shows an arbitrarily chosen set of vendors.
In short, that means it's completely meaningless. You can't draw any conclusions from that.
If you would want to make a somewhat serious comparison, you'd choose two sets of vendors from some predetermined metric (revenue, # of employees, whatever..) with one group of OSS vendors and one group of ordinary software vendors, and then you could compare for geographic differences. I doubt you'd find any significant ones.
Anyway, my answer is: No, not at all. Places like Russia, China and India are not underrepresented in the FOSS world. But "underrepresented" does not mean "underrepresented with respect to their population". They're certainly underrepresented with respect to that. The real factors that are important here are Computer use, Internet use, Education level and Language skills (in particular English).
A more decent (but still very crude) metric, which reflects my own experiences of the FOSS world can be found on the http://www.wikipedia.org/ [wikipedia.org]wikipedia main page. Look at the number of articles in different languages. There are more articles in Dutch (22 million speakers) and Swedish (9 million) than in Spanish (400 million) or even Chinese (1.3 billion).
Why? Software piracy can hardly be the answer to that. Rather, it's because Holland and Sweden have high computer use, very high Internet penetration, very high education levels, and they all know English as a second language. So you'd also expect more Dutch and Swedish OSS developers than Chinese or South American ones, and in my experience, that seems to be the case.
So if you take the "Wikipedia articles metric" as a measurement of most of the factors needed for OSS development, then I don't think these countries are particularily underrepresented at all. And I don't think piracy is a factor. And if it is, it'd be impossible measure accurately because of all the other factors which seem a lot more significant.
Re:One enormous flaw... (Score:3, Informative)
I expect that rather than a correlation with "piracy", you're simply seeing the effect of economic development and other obvious factors (people who don't have computers or reliable net connections, are less likely to participate
Another effect I've noticed is that in countries like Japan there are lots of "local" FOSS projects (often forks of more widespread packages) which never really seem to show their face outside that country. I guess this is due to both language and cultural issues (and some technical ones -- massive changes to support your local language may be very important to you, but the original developer may not accept them). I imagine that in countries with less widespread connectivity, this effect may be even greater.
Open source /vendors/ (Score:3, Informative)
The map of developers, which would be much more interesting, is impractical to create. I've seen partial maps for a number of projects, though, and they certainly don't show the same distribution as the referenced article. I just went looking for a GNOME one but the only one I could find was on frappr, and was clearly so incomplete as to be nigh useless (_nobody_ in Australia; only two in the US, etc).
A more personal example is the Scribus team, which has no members in the USA. The core developers are in Germany, France, Luxembourg, Czechoslovakia, Finland, and Australia. Of those, one originally lived in the US but moved, and one more used to live in Australia but moved. Hardly "silicon valley". The contributors see more US involvement, but not a huge amount more, and the translation teams are obviously incredibly internationally distributed. Our user base is also very international, as Scribus's translations and support for other languages is its main advantage (beyond cost) over the big DTP names.
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Craig Ringer
Samba not Listed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Get slashdotted! (Score:3, Informative)
Slashdot editors are good trolls