Amanda McPherson of the Linux Foundation writes about the recent Linux Foundation symposium in Japan: Linux is Big in Japan — Our Symposium.
While the majority of the audience came from Japan, attendees came from throughout Asia. The audience consisted almost completely of developers attending from such companies as NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NTT, Sony, Toshiba, Canon and Red Hat and from universities including Tokyo University and Waseda University. An audience survey revealed that the areas of most interest to the attendees included server, desktop and embedded with the largest technical interests focused on virtualization, process scheduler and file systems, in that order.
Andrew Morton informed the audience that about 15% of current kernel contributions are now coming from Japan – something we hope the Japan Symposiums have contributed to.
This statistic of the relatively high (in my opinion) participation in the kernel from Japan is interesting because it somewhat contradicts things Linus said in an earlier interview at the Linux Foundation (about the lack of participation in the kernel from Asia), which I also blogged about in January. That there is a strong contingent of contributors to the Linux kernel from Japan is a great trend and something that I think disproves the myth that “Asia” doesn’t contribute to open source. Let’s look forward to more contributions to open source from all over the world, not just the places where OSS has been traditionally strong.
I think when some people talk about open source participation being low in Asia they often have in mind volunteer contributions and other non-paid participation from individuals who find that FOSS appeals to them. It would be interesting to know what proportion of the 15% of kernel contributions that come from Japan are from volunteers and how that proportion compares to the proportion overall. (Of course, given its nature, kernel participation may not be a good measure of FOSS acceptance and participation in society at large.) Certainly, corporate entities all over the world will find it beneficial to use and collaborate on open source software, but how well non-corporate entities and individuals embrace it is a bit different. At any rate, it’s great to hear that corporate attendance at the symposium was strong and that so many kernel contributions – corporate or otherwise – are coming from Japan.