Asia's culture is its main hindrance to growing the region's open source developers.
Although there is wide use of open source technology in Asia, industry watchers say it will be another generation or so before we will see much contribution back to the open source community from the region.
Linux-founder, Linus Torvalds, previously said in an interview with The Linux Foundation that there is good penetration of open source in Asia, but developers in the region are hampered not only by language, but more so by their culture.
Harish Pillay, open source evangelist with Red Hat Asia-Pacific, acknowledges that it will "take time" for the region to catch up with the West.
Pillay explained in an interview that Linux's early developers contributed not for the money, and had been consumers of the Internet for many years. "The 'late comers'--the Asian nations--are at a stage of consuming it and trying to find their place under the open source sun.
"We have to perhaps wait a generation in Asia before we see a steep ramp up," said Pillay. This growth will come through today's [IT]-exposed users' children, who early in life have become exposed to technology and open source as consumers "for them to start tinkering and contributing".
Pillay is expecting the next decade's open source contributions from the region to "wildly surpass" that of the last decade's. "There are significant contributions to Apache out of Sri Lanka [and to the kernel] in Japan," said Pillay.
Red Hat APAC open source evangelist
Alex Fletcher, entiva group principal analyst, said that the need for Asian channel partners to wean themselves off from U.S. companies is one of the drivers for an increased interest in open source in the region.
"Various Asian countries, Japan in particular, have proven willing to begin the process of thrusting off dependence on the Microsoft hegemony...Japan proposed the development of an Asian operating system four years ago," said Fletcher in an interview.
Fletcher added that Asia must first "understand the realities of open source" to address its cultural barriers.
"Undoubtedly, this will be a long, drawn out process that unfolds over the course of years. The region first needs a unified strategy and framework for localizing languages across different open source communities," he said.
There also has to be more communication and effort to link open source communities, globally, added Fletcher, elaborating that there is still a rift between geographically-separated communities.
Pillay lamented the declining significance of programming modules in computer science courses in Singapore tertiary institutions.
"It is very hard to hire a fresh student from the Singapore schools who can code in C for example. The schools do not teach it anymore and yet C is crucial and fundamental to the Linux kernel.
"They are largely doing 'pointy clicky' stuff using proprietary tools from proprietary vendors who are only happy to dumb down the technology," said Pillay.
Play video
» Ultimate virtualization blade
On the comment on Singapore Universities do not teach C anymore. I guess the reason for this is boils down to demand. Sad to say I have not seen any job requirements for C for a long long time...
Posted by Chia Morgan on Monday, February 04 2008 11:57 AM