Where is Asia's contribution to open source?

commentary

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.