Open Source Software,Role

In Globlization

MONARCH SRIVASTAVA
RINU SAHAY
SONAL
Brief introduction of FOSS
 FOSS (Free/Open Source Software)
 Emerged from 1970s
 Represented by
 Unix
 Gnu
 Linux
 Through 30 years of experience,
development model has been proved
viable
Growth of FOSS
 50+ open source initiative (OSI)
 GPL
 BSD
 Mozilla
 …
 Thousands of open source projects
How to define a successful project
 Popularity
The number of users.
 Participation
The number of developers.
More work can be done. More ideas can be
implemented.
 The two factors affect each other
 More users -> more developers
 More developers -> better quality -> more
users
Agenda

What obstacles are we facing?

Language
 Different official languages
 English is official for FOSS projects
 English is not official for most people in other
regions
 The situation won’t change
 The world is growing to be more diverse,
tradition is more valued.
 English is not likely to be much more popular in
the future.
 Community should live with it, and try to
address this problem
Language (cont.)
 Language family
 People from some countries may find English not so hard to
learn
 East Asia, middle east, north Africa may find English harder
to learn than others
Language (China)
 Most people can’t use English freely
 Read/write tends to be much slower
 Easier to misapprehend
 Can’t express idea clearly
 People are being afraid to
communicate in English
Cultural
 Any other country could be different, even
different parts of one country could be
different
 List a few differences between China and
FOSS community (not all)
 Communication: apprehension towards criticism
Chinese are used to tactful remarks, likely to treat
direct criticism as insult. While direct criticism
are quite common in patch review process.
 Management style: Organizational behaviors
Chinese are used to and are more effective in
close-knit team. Community likes loosely-knit
team.
Economical
 Developing countries
 Less education
 Without good IT industry
 Spend more time and energy to work for
a living, less time and energy for hobbies
Political
 Government support
 Financial
 Good policies
Summary of problems
 Language and culture problems make
communication much difficult, which is the
biggest challenge
 Political problems can be addressed but not
easy
Need to negotiate as strong organization
 Geographical and economical problems
can’t be addressed. We should make up by
other means
Agenda

What can we do?

What can we do?
 Is this a new problem?
 Look at multi-national enterprises
 Local marketing and sales
 Local R&D centers to attract talents
 Local PR department to deal with
government relationship
 Establish aligned local communities to
provide localized help
Unaligned local community
Unaligned local community
 Good for users
 Not enough for developers
 Interactive
 Shared goals
Aligned local developer community
The way it works

Local Local
developers developers
Global Community
developers

Local
developers
Benefit
 Developer overlap between global
and local community, form strong
connection
 Share the same goal and standard
 Can help other local developers to
communicate with the global
community
 Bridge obstacles for normal local
developers
Agenda

What are we doing in China?

Zh-kernel.org community
 A Chinese language and culture
oriented Linux kernel development
community
General goals
 Promote contribution to Linux and make Linux
better to use
 Reduce the negative effect of the language and
culture differences for Chinese kernel developers to
participate
 Encourage Chinese developers to help each other
 Attract and sustain more kernel developers in China
 Improve overall technical skills on Linux related
development in China
Characteristic
 Focus more on development and
contribution
 Improve communication and tighten
connection with English community
rather than being isolated
 Provide help to address obstacles in
every stage of the development
process
Wiki pages in Chinese
 http://zh-kernel.org
 A platform to publish and share
kernel development information,
including:
 Translated documents, Chinese books
and articles
 Local development activities
 Host local projects/sub-projects
 Introduction to non-local projects
Summary
 Real global participation is very
important to FOSS
 We FOSS community should
initiatively do things to attract people
from the other regions rather than
waiting for them to join
 Establishing local communities is a
good way to try