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Does It Matter Where Open Source is Based?
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."
Google map + Any story + Web 2.0 mash up = Get slashdotted
Funnypics
How does this map show the "the vally" is the center of the OSS world? It is a limited cross section of projects that the creator is interested in, his opinion / perspective is worthless and invalid.
... except when it is based out of Redmond, WA
Two points to make here, because of the nature of open source, and technology in general you don't necessarily need to have everybody at the downtown office, or a downtown office to begin with. This has _nothing_ to do with it being open source or not. A map of large tech companies I would guess is as equally diverse.
;)
There's a reason to go to silicon valley. The area is beautiful, and the talent pool for your $COMPANY there is tremendous, if you need 20 engineers to work on some software project, finding 20 skilled individuals in Atlanta, Georgia is going to suck. Trying to find 20 skilled people in silicon valley is a matter of going out to a busy resturant at lunch
Error 407 - No creative sig found
From the article:
It makes sense to see so many dots in the Silicon Valley since this is a map of where companies who develop open source software are located. I would guess that if plotted where developers who have created open source software, enterprise or not, are located that you will find a *lot* more dots in Europe and a lot less in Silicon Valley.
So really, nothing to see here, move along.
0*0
00*
***
open source vendors != open source creators
factor 966971: 966971
No,
As long as it stays away from Redmond.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Interesting map - I can't possibly guess where the originator of the article might be based.
Equally interesting is that he somehow has forgotten where Linux started up, where iRC originated and so many other open source projects have come up. SuSE is no where on the map and the other countless German open source contributions.
All in all, this is about as much news (or accurate) as most of the stuff on the Inquirer.
Is this just companies that create open source solutions, like MySQL is? Companies that sell open source solutions other people primarily made, like IBM does? Places like SourceForge? What?
How many important open source projects have one central coordinating authority, like SourceForge or LKML, and the actual project members are spread geographically over the globe?
Who exactly is on this list, and how were they chosen? The article does not say what the selection criteria was, and I see entries on the map ranging from JBoss (an important project) to "Linux Networx" (Who?).
If this map tosses in companies like IBM for whom open source is an important strategy but still a peripheral part of their business, but ignores people like Alan Cox living in a little cottage in a field somewhere in Britain, it may be all you've done here is make a map of "software corporations".
It matters a lot where opensource is based and it will tend not to be in the valley. Those projects cited are a small, select few. The opensource mentality isn't as strong there as other parts of the country and world. And the United States (as a citizen who deals with those in other countries on opensource projects, I can say this) have much better cultures and laws for open source to properly thrive. Things like the DMCA and our patent system aren't just a pain for the consumer but will cause us to lose businesses too. It may take time but when they notice it will be a bit late.
I think that the only thing that would be a problem for open source is if you insisted on sending, say, a Debian CD via FedEx to Myanmar - one of about eighteen locations that FedEx just doesn't go. Otherwise, it's the 'net that keeps it all together.
This sig no verb.
I don't think, with the Internet, that it really matters where OSS is based. Torvalds seems to be doing fine from Portland, and is mostly used in the US now. I don't think most Ubuntu desktop users even know that it was originally written in Finland.
The map shows open source "vendors" not open source developers. Of course it shows essentially the same distribution as software vendors in general. The surprise would be if it showed anything else.
It also says exactly nothing about the physical distribution of the open source phenomenon.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
That said, Silicon Valley does have a much higher concentration of computer people than just about anywhere else in the world. So if there is a relatively constant percentage of developers who contribute to open source projects, naturally you'll find the most open source contributors wherever you find the most developers in general.
... is that the map is about open source vendors .
If you count open-source software companies (I have seen ActiveState and CodeWeavers, for instance), sure, it seems most of it is gathered in the USA and in Europe.
But take a look at, for instance, the map of the OpenBSD developers (at the bottom of the link): there are individuals working on OpenBSD all over the place.
Another case that I know well is Slackware: there are developers helping Patrick Volkerding all over the world, with strong clusters in Italy, Brazil, the UK and other countries. Mandriva is a French/Brazilian companies, with strong sales in the USA, and so on and so forth. And there are so many other projects out there that are definitely not US-centric.
So, again: count companies and Open Source seems to be based in Silicon Valley. Take a look at individual developers and the picture becomes a lot more international.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The total area of Greenland is 0.8 million sq. miles and the total area of Africa is 11.6 million sq. miles? Now look at Google's map...
I would guess that if plotted where developers who have created open source software, enterprise or not, are located that you will find a *lot* more dots in Europe and a lot less in Silicon Valley.
Like this?
It's just like the rap game: where you're from always matters.
Effective immediately, my OSS support company will be keeping it real. "O.G. Suppizort" is located in the city of Compton.
You can go to the *Varsity hotdog stand* in atlanta and find 20 good coders any lunchtime, and maybe some nanotech guys, chemists, etc.
I think you haven't been to atlanta in a long time....
They are leaving Portland although their kit is still at this location, I've heard that they took venture $$$ and are moving to CA. Sort of supports the OP I guess.
..just to prove I'm not kidding, here is an overview article I found
w .html
http://www.atlantasmartcity.com/html/work/overvie
With a maze of differing import laws, munitions export laws, patent laws, and copyright anti-circumvention laws, it matters very much in which jurisdiction a free software project is developed, even with the Internet.
But the Linux® kernel has big companies behind it (such as IBM) that can use their patent portfolios to countersue software patent trolls. In addition, Linus himself doesn't work on parts of the operating system that might be subject to munitions control (hardcore crypto), actual non-obvious software patents (media decoders), or circumvention bans (DVD players).
I'm an open-source developer (Ultima Linux, PyWord – just to name a few. And yet I'm living on the east coast of the U.S. In fact, so's Red Hat. Not to mention Slackware, now in Minnesota, or even MySQL, who's all the way over in Sweden. I've also noticed a lot of my users tend to be from European countries – Germany, France, Sweden, England, Ireland... and that's only counting a small handful. Oh, and Linus himself is in Portland, Oregon, which is a bit closer but still not in the valley. So unless I'm missing the point entirely, I'd have to say the article must be completely wrong...
;-)
DISCLAIMER: I will admit I haven't read the article yet, so I probably am missing the point, but may as well post anyway, since this is Slashdot
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
This map makes me wonder about India. I have the impression that India is a big, big open source consumer, yet it seems there's not much OSS coming out of it, eventhough it has millions of programmers. Why?
If you know of a way to represent the surface of a sphere perfectly on a plane, I'm sure we'd all be happy to hear about it. Any projection you choose is going to have serious compromises.
... up-left-ish-bound I-5 ... damn, should have used Mapquest; at least they know which way north is.") Goode homolosine is equal-area, but how do you deal with paths that cross the huge gaps? Points that are right next to each other appear a huge distance away. Mercator is actually a good fit here.
I think "north is always up, and fills a rectangle completely with no gaps" is a pretty decent set of invariants for an interactive map. Sure, you can come up with crazy projections that are more accurate at this-or-that for an atlas, but when you have to dynamically scroll around and draw points and paths, it gets really messy.
Quincuncial is conformal, but everybody is confused (especially when zooming) because they don't know where north is. ("Now we'll go 5 miles on
So, companies selling open source products are a "silicon valley phenomenon". Surprise surprise.
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.
--
Craig Ringer
Open source is very much an online phenomenon. Jesus, there have been decades of cyberpunk novels, and yet folks still don't seem to get that online is a place! That is where free software lives and it is what makes it such a great method of creation.
I was considering where to donate money, and KDE is something that I use a lot, I tried to look up how to give it money.. and it was in germany or something like that.. No tax deduction there!
Or maybe I'm just confused about the whole tax thing.
http://www.kde.org/support/support.php
I found out that I didn't donate enough percentage of my money to qualify for a tax deduction anyway, It would have had to be well over 10 percent of my income to get a break larger than standard deduction.
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
so naturally any OSS they work on comes from the US. It's probably more of an Indian company thing. Do Wipro et al have any of their programmers contributing to open source like IBM or HP do? Incidentially, some of IBM's Linux specialists are based in India.
GNAA failed to steal the get because it was predetermined, like usual. hazukiget indeed
Two words for you:
KDE
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Silicon Valley (where I live) is FULL, literally FULL of tech people. Part of the reason technology thrives is that in the west, there aren't many traditions and family ancestors. It may sound irrelevant, but people out here are willing at a very young age to learn anything. Kid C++ writers are rampant, as are adult programmers.
Something else is that most of the huge computer companies have manufacturing out here, and Micron PC has its headquarters in Boise, ID. Like someone said, it is very easy for a computer-related company to find competent employees they don't have to train from ground zero. And taxes are relatively low (at least in Idaho) and land is plentiful.
-a programmer
Also, the map does not reflect where the OSS developers come from.
Linus Torvalds's country, anyone?
The guy is an immigrant aiming to steal our 'merikin jerbs.
[it's a joke, dammit]
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Not even Samba - created by Australian Andrew Tridgell, is listed! How is this credible?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
This might show where some of the OSS **vendors** are located, but it does not show where the people writing the code are.... and it freaks me that New Zealand and half of Oz are not on the map. I live in NZ and I've written my share of OSS!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
That guy is wrong about so many things regarding open source, this is just the latest...
I've seen references in these comments to a map of Debian developers, and another map of BSD developers. If there anything for other groups of developers?
If you could add that 'I am wearing canadian underwear', you have great chances to win.
hilarious
Where the hell is the marker for South Africa?? It's only one of the most widely used Linux distros...
For now at least, it doesn't matter where it is based. It matters where it is used.
According to the article, there is no open source supplier from Germany. Shall I be skeptical about the article ?
Why not use it? Oh, right. vendors....
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Correction: making money by selling OSS may be a Silicon Valley phenomenon,
but actually writing the damn code is not. Much of that is taking place in
Europe.
- Anonycous Moward