I was called earlier this week by some technology show inquiring if I’d join a forum discussing the local Open Source Projects, and the reasons why the are rather scarce. I ended up not being able to join that forum, but it did get me thinking, I can’t think of even a handful of products that originated in our region, or even contributions to existing products. Even with the recent startups/innovation boom, I don’t recall seeing any opensource code to speak off.
After spending some time googling around and searching for any serious opensource project i was only able to find a Linux distro (Ojuba) that was developed in our region and seems like even that project was stopped 2 years ago. I also recalled seeing some Egyptian themed redhat based distro but can’t recall its name, I’m sure however it was discontinued. Other than that I wasn’t really able to find any mention worthy Open Source projects to speak off. Still I was able to find several Open Source fonts and even music…so seems the Open Source shortage is limited to code.
In the last 5 years several products emerged, some where complex enough for its code to be open source worthy, kngine for instance with their semantic web based search engine…it faded out of the scene now, but i believe it’d have persisted if he chose to open source it. Same applies to several other projects that may have failed business wise, but would have definitely left an impact if its code was shared with the world. So why aren’t people sharing their code with the world in our region as they do in other places.
There are several approaches to open source code development for instance:
- an individuals building such an amazing algorithm then sharing it on github for the world to use.
- A Company builds a really interesting product and decides to release its code for developers knowing that they still own it as intellectual property even though the world can see the code you can’t use it to earn money without contacting that company first.
- A group of developers collaborate to build a project then share its code to the world.
My thought process led me to question the motivations that lead source code to be shared. I believe in cases of individuals code is shared as a way to gain credit, after all who doesn’t know Linus Torvalds, or Phil Zimmermann, and their contributions. Even though their code is free to use, they still made more fame and subsequently money out of their products than they’d have if they sold it to some corporation. As for corporations, sharing the code serves to allow people to port and improve it, also to go over the code and increase the resilience through a process of global peer review, a really decent example here would be Android OS, open source and with millions of variations out and yet not nearly as many security issues as iOS.
I believe the following reasons are why we don’t see that many open source projects originating in our side of the world:
Lack of Time (individuals): Time being one of the most expensive assets we have (and the only one we can’t replenish) is wasted in traffic, red tape and other smaller fruitless activities, the time left after doing all of this isn’t nearly enough to be donate to open source development. Developing elegant share worthy code takes a lot of effort, not to mention the clarity of mind to sit down and plan something.
Lack of Recognition (Individuals): The local eco-systems doesn’t reward people who’ve been involved in even successful open source projects. Most corporate would dismiss that as irrelevant.
Lack of Resources (for Companies): Managing a project to completion is expensive, sharing the code isn’t nearly as rewarding in our region due to the lax intellectual property laws. Your competitors can just take your code and use it as is without crediting or consulting you. and good luck trying to convince a judge that this was actually your code, I don’t believe they have computer code technical advisers in our judiciary system to being with. Furthermore I’m not really sure you can patent code. Sharing your code wouldn’t result in people porting and improving it while retaining the credit, instead it’d result in creating competition and wasting the resources invested in the product.
Please feel free to share your opinions and your points of view on this topic…
