Where is Asia's contribution to open source?
I've been involved with open source for over 10 years, and in that time Asia has hardly gotten involved. At all. Yes, the Japanese and Korean electronics companies happily adopted embedded Linux long ago, but this is the exception to the rule: Asia doesn't contribute much to open-source projects, as ZDNet points out.
Why?
It's not a question of adoption of open source, which Asia has, though here, too, my experience has Asia well behind the the Americas and Europe. It's a question of contribution.
One would think the communal aspect of open source would jibe well with Japan, for instance. But it doesn't. One would think the entrepreneurial drive of Taiwan and China would see them building open-source projects in their own image, to suit their own needs. But they don't.
Why?
I don't know. Anyone have any ideas? With all the incredible talent in Asia, there must be some way to open up the development floodgates there to let the code start to flow.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
For example, the entire Ruby community owes its thanks to Japanese open source developers. Without them frameworks like Ruby on Rails would not exist. Ruby itself was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto, a Japanese computer scientist.
Or look at IPv6 and IPSec. The late Itojun was a major force in introducing IPv6 to the world through his open source efforts. Itojun and his Japanese colleagues formed the KAME Project to implement IPv6 and IPSec first on BSD and later on Linux (see the USAGI project .)
Or look at KDE. KOffice and KSpread owes much to Indonesian developer Ariya Hidayat.
Or the immense (and surprising) contributions to the Apache project from Sri Lankan(!) developers. They practically wrote the entire Apache AXIS web-services stack from scratch!!
The popular Seasar2 application framework came from Japan.
Chinese developers are working on a number of open source projects, including JFox (a J2EE container) and Orbas (a CORBA implentation).
Sylpheed, the popular Unix / GTK+ email client is the creation of Japanese developer Hiroyuki Yamamoto.
H.J. Lu has been huge influence over many years for his work on GCC and libc.
Hermes H2O is a comprehensive, open source AS2 Messaging Gateway from Hong Kong.
Hiroshi Inoue, Hiroshi Saito, Tatsuo Ishii and others are major contributors to Postgresql.
Not to mention the numerous individual developers from Asia who are involved in "mainstream" open source projects such as Linux, PHP, etc. Just looking at the list of FreeBSD developers, for example, reveals the names of numerous Asian committers.
If there is in fact less open source contributors from Asian countries, then it may have something to do with language. Many open source communities communicate using English. For those in the US and for many Europeans, this doesn't present as much of a challenge as it would for speakers of Asian languages. Just a guess.
Made by an Australian (small island in asia pasific region on many maps),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_%28software%29
Is Asia a bigger contributor than Silicon Valley?
Ian W.
Korea, North and South, working together on Linux. China, working on Linux. Oh, and the hardware support for Linux comes mainly from... where the hardware is made.
Asia's around. You just have to pay attention.
- by gkanai February 13, 2008 8:13 PM PST
- Matt- I was recently sent this list of Korean committers to open source projects. Clearly Korea is significantly present in the OSS community even if that does not meet Linus' awareness.
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(6 Comments)http://wiki.kldp.org/wiki.php/KoreanOpenSourceCommitter