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Does It Matter Where Open Source is Based?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-anywhere dept.

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."

34 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Get slashdotted! by crazyjeremy · · Score: 5, Funny
    I'll admit that the map itself doesn't really tell us much - but it's a work in progress and hey, it's a Web 2.0 mash up, it's meant to be vague, self-fulfilling and of questionable real-world value.
    What have we learned here?
    Google map + Any story + Web 2.0 mash up = Get slashdotted
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    1. Re:Get slashdotted! by kesuki · · Score: 5, Insightful

      don't worry you didn't miss anything :)

      a map full of baloons claiming that open source only is developed in a few developed nations. completely ignoring developments from africa, australia, and several other locations :) bascially you just saved yourself 15 minutes of your time by not reading the article :)

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      https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
    2. Re:Get slashdotted! by crazyjeremy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What does this say about how much employers trust telecommuters. Can't a lot of people in these industries work from home anyway? How many must actually be in the office?

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    3. Re:Get slashdotted! by theglassishalf · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Seriously. I stopped caring about it when I saw that the map didn't even bother with non SV-based MySQL. (Hm. They're not important, I guess.) Give me a break.

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    4. Re:Get slashdotted! by kesuki · · Score: 2, Funny

      reread what i said carefully, then pay the man his money :)

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      https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
    5. Re:Get slashdotted! by Itchy+Rich · · Score: 2, Funny

      According to this there are only two open source vendors in the UK (one in Berkshire and one on the Isle of Man).

      Clearly a huge data sample there.

    6. Re:Get slashdotted! by marcello_dl · · Score: 2, Informative

      Indeed. And how much the distribution of vendors mean for free software? Just give a look at debian available site translations and look at the email addresses in the mailing lists.
      Slashdot editors are good trolls :D

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  2. Makes no sense to me by p!ssa · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Makes no sense to me by croddy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      additionally, it appears that the concentration of open source balloons on his map is much higher on the east coast of the united states than the bay area -- or the entire west coast. i'm not sure what the summary is getting at here, but it sounds like someone's just trying to drum up adsense hits.

    2. Re:Makes no sense to me by Zeinfeld · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Its worse than that, it treats each OSS project as if it was a geographically concentrated entity. Most are not.

      The Apache group worked together for years without most of the principals so much as meeting. It began in Chicago at NCSA and spread.

      The origin of the OSS movement was quite definitely Cambridge MA and Stallman. He may be mad as a hatter but he did start things.

      OK so there are more OSS startups based in the valley than elsewhere. That merely shows that there is more VC in the Valley and they don't like to travel. If people are going to treat the OSS startups as if they are OSS then we might as well close up show now.

      Most of the OSS startups have business models that make no more sense than Dilbert and Wally's attempt to corner the maket for Internet sales of tuna sandwiches. Boy it sure looks like 1997 again. Only difference this time is that OSS is the new Java.

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    3. Re:Makes no sense to me by larytet · · Score: 2, Interesting

      i live in Israel, my pojects are kept on SourceForge servers (supposedly S.V.). should i label my projects "made in the US" ?

    4. Re:Makes no sense to me by vodka_au · · Score: 2, Interesting

      There may be an additional factor here.

      In the private sector growing companies from out side of the US will get them selves a Silicon Valley address. This an important strategy for continued growth especially for the lucrative US market. From a marketing point of view Americans prefer to buy from someone they see as American and for the rest of the world a Silicon Valley address is seen as pedigree.

      I can't speak for any existing Open Source project, but t seems to me, if you have developers from around the globe a Silicon Valley address would be the best of an otherwise arbitrary choice of location if you want market acceptance.

  3. They miss the point completely. by agent+dero · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 ;)

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  4. But where are the developers by Hyram+Graff · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From the article:

    What this map does not take into account, of course, is where the individual developers are based - it is a representation of enterprise open source providers, as opposed to open source developers - and it would be interesting to see how different that map would look (if it were possible to create one).

    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.

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  5. duh by doti · · Score: 5, Insightful

    open source vendors != open source creators

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    1. Re:duh by jc42 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
  6. What an accurate map.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  7. What does "providers" mean? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

  8. it matters and its not the valley by GenKreton · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:it matters and its not the valley by koreth · · Score: 2, Interesting
      The opensource mentality isn't as strong there as other parts of the country and world.

      As someone who has worked in the valley for nearly 20 years, I have to wonder what evidence you have to support that idea. It certainly runs counter to my experience here. At more than one of my jobs I have been not only allowed, but encouraged by my management to open-source software I've written on company time. (Not everything I've written, of course, but stuff that is not part of the company's core business.)

      Do you have some numbers to back that claim up?

  9. It's over the Internet. by eosp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  10. This is stupid by Spazmania · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

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  11. Depends on the kind of open source by koreth · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

  12. One enormous flaw... by Noryungi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... 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.

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    1. Re:One enormous flaw... by k98sven · · Score: 2, Informative

      One question I found myself asking (upon seeing the map) was, "Is the `piracy hurts OSS' argument true?" There don't seem to be many ticks where wholesale software piracy is rampant. (i.e. China, India, Russia, etc.)

      Now, as so many people pointed out, the map shows vendors, not developers, so the map doesn't actually do much to answer that question. Can anyone offer some insight?

      Not only vendors, but as people have also pointed out the map shows an arbitrarily chosen set of vendors.
      In short, that means it's completely meaningless. You can't draw any conclusions from that.

      If you would want to make a somewhat serious comparison, you'd choose two sets of vendors from some predetermined metric (revenue, # of employees, whatever..) with one group of OSS vendors and one group of ordinary software vendors, and then you could compare for geographic differences. I doubt you'd find any significant ones.

      Anyway, my answer is: No, not at all. Places like Russia, China and India are not underrepresented in the FOSS world. But "underrepresented" does not mean "underrepresented with respect to their population". They're certainly underrepresented with respect to that. The real factors that are important here are Computer use, Internet use, Education level and Language skills (in particular English).

      A more decent (but still very crude) metric, which reflects my own experiences of the FOSS world can be found on the http://www.wikipedia.org/wikipedia main page. Look at the number of articles in different languages. There are more articles in Dutch (22 million speakers) and Swedish (9 million) than in Spanish (400 million) or even Chinese (1.3 billion).

      Why? Software piracy can hardly be the answer to that. Rather, it's because Holland and Sweden have high computer use, very high Internet penetration, very high education levels, and they all know English as a second language. So you'd also expect more Dutch and Swedish OSS developers than Chinese or South American ones, and in my experience, that seems to be the case.

      So if you take the "Wikipedia articles metric" as a measurement of most of the factors needed for OSS development, then I don't think these countries are particularily underrepresented at all. And I don't think piracy is a factor. And if it is, it'd be impossible measure accurately because of all the other factors which seem a lot more significant.

    2. Re:One enormous flaw... by macshit · · Score: 2, Informative

      The main FOSS project I'm involved with is GNU Emacs, and the people who post to the development mailing list seem to be rather evenly distributed over the entire globe (it's funny watching replies to a message slowly coming in as people wake up in successive time zones), with the exception of Africa (er, and Antarctica I suppose). What variation there is seems to match what one might expect from variations in population and economic development pretty well; of course as it's an english language list, there's also a bias towards english-speaking countries.

      I expect that rather than a correlation with "piracy", you're simply seeing the effect of economic development and other obvious factors (people who don't have computers or reliable net connections, are less likely to participate :-).

      Another effect I've noticed is that in countries like Japan there are lots of "local" FOSS projects (often forks of more widespread packages) which never really seem to show their face outside that country. I guess this is due to both language and cultural issues (and some technical ones -- massive changes to support your local language may be very important to you, but the original developer may not accept them). I imagine that in countries with less widespread connectivity, this effect may be even greater.

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  13. Re:Does it matter where open source is based? by crunch_ca · · Score: 2, Interesting
    No, As long as it stays away from Redmond.

    I'd be ok if companies in Redmond open sourced some of their software. If they did, I might consider using their software on occassion.

    But it's still my choice.

  14. Right here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

    1. Re:Right here by xenocide2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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  15. are you kidding?? by zogger · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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....

  16. Open source /vendors/ by Craig+Ringer · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

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    Craig Ringer

  17. Samba not Listed by zizdodrian · · Score: 2, Informative

    Not even Samba - created by Australian Andrew Tridgell, is listed! How is this credible?

  18. Re:See Finland on the map? I don't. by Nutria · · Score: 2, Funny
    The guy is an immigrant aiming to steal our 'merikin jerbs.

    What's a jerb?

    --
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  19. Vendors != producers by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!

    --
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