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."

Comments

Depends on the kind of open source

[koreth]

If you mean "a commercial product for which the vendor has decided to release source code," then sure, it's going to concentrate where the tech companies are. If you mean "a volunteer/hobby project that isn't associated with a company," I'd expect the map to be much more diffuse. I know I've gotten contributions from all over the world when I've run open source projects in the past.

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.

One enormous flaw...

[Noryungi]

... 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.

Re:duh

[jc42]

open source vendors != open source creators

Indeed; this is the main thing I noticed about the article.

I'm part of several open-source efforts. One is a music package first developed by a math prof in Germany. When he announced to the mailing list that he was getting too busy, at least three of us started forks of his code and implemented radically different new features (needed by different groups of musicians). All of us (including the original author) have put our source code online for anyone who wants it. This means that we aren't "vendors"; i.e., we aren't selling it. So we aren't included in this articles data. None of us developers are in Silicon Valley.

In a different direction, I'm one of at least a thousand C developers who has a personal collection of C debugging tools. I wrote some, downloaded some, and radically rewrote a few other tools. I keep it all online. I see occasional downloads (by non-search-bots ;-), and I occasionally get email from users, often with patches to add new features. I also send occasional patches to others. None of this stuff is for sale; you can only get it free. So none of us are "vendors" of C debug tools, and we aren't in TFA's statistics.

Talking about open-source "vendors" pretty much labels the writer as clueless. Either that, or someone trying to prove something and hoping we won't notice the verbal sleight of hand.

Re:Right here

[xenocide2]

The google map of enterprises looked similar at a high level, but when you zoom in on silicon valley, you find it places a TON of blips there, not 3. If you want to avoid that and examine the Debian Developer locations, I suggest this map.

Things you'll notice is that there's still a good cluster in Silicon Valley, but there's also a good cluster in Boston, and the seemingly huge list of European locations isn't quite so huge, there's just more cities with less people. Most interestingly, there's very few Russian participants, despite there being plenty of talented software developers. Finally, the largest Debian developer area is probably Tokyo.