After reading this. I realize how different Asian and Western consciousness really are.
My entire technology stack was built on Microsoft's ecosystem, not on open source. This was Microsoft's attempt to expand their base for the corporate hiring market and OS market share.
Conversely, open source was a huge barrier for me. When I have a product I've built, I have to get past open source, but accessing open source comes with the barrier of English. And once you get past the English barrier, you hit the cultural barrier.
My hobby projects do integrate with open source, but all the technology that actually makes me money depends entirely on the Microsoft ecosystem. Most of the Asian developers around me are also tied to specific vendors. On the other hand, the Korean companies that do have a culture of contributing to open source are large corporations, and entry is determined by academic pedigree.
Because the entire context of open source is in English, and learning English reliably is expensive in itself. So to properly work as a developer in Korea, you actually need to be vendor dependent. The corporate ecosystem is not oppression; it is the only viable path to education and survival. If you want to grasp the latest trends, you ultimately need curation from a specific company. Some people say Hangul is a great writing system, but to me, this is where it becomes a curse and a shackle.
So when I read Hacker News, I feel just how large the gap in thinking is between the West and the East. The Japanese developers I have talked to mostly talk about coding within corporate environments rather than open source, and Chinese developers are also shaped by their corporate environments. But the posts on HN talk about their 'gardens' being ruined and absorbed by corporations, and they resist that. But since I was raised in a corporate environment from the start, I cannot imagine a different one, so this resistance tends to feel like an aristocratic hobby to me.
On the flip side, HN might see corporations as predators. Technology should be a commons, and developers should be free, not tenant farmers of a platform.
But the irony I personally feel is that to protect this 'garden commons,' they end up creating centralized, non-public coordination mechanisms with the very corporations that plunder the commons. That feels contradictory to me.
For security vulnerability response, non-public coordination may be necessary. If a vulnerability is disclosed before a patch is ready, attackers can create exploits. But the principle of open source is transparency and open discussion, while the Akrites-style security principle is non-public coordination and a single point of contact.
On top of that, corporations used open source as free infrastructure, and now that the risk has grown, they are building corporate-led governance systems based on that risk. That feels ambiguous to me. Of course, open source sponsorship has always had some tension, but if that was buying a craftsman's work, this looks more like buying the craftsman's workshop.
I wonder how Westerners would read this. I am curious. To me, this looks like a political struggle to take control of governance over the commons. Do Westerners see it as the Avengers? The difference in mindset is sometimes painful.
The corporate environments were here too, most companies used to run on Windows server. 20 years ago companies used to pretend they didnt use Linux, but they were, it was just introduced to places they didnt know about, as it was free so it didnt have to go through purchasing. The rise of the early web in the post dotcom years was the catalyst, Perl, PHP, Linux servers etc. Before mobile, that did bring back proprietary development to some extent, for clientside. That was the era when Microsoft said "Linux was a cancer". Many companies still have large Windows (dot Net pre dotnet core) codebases, but Java mostly runs in Linux now.
The language barrier is interesting, there is more Chinese open source now too, but yes so much is English. I remember using google translate for Nginx from Russian back in the day, and openresty from Chinese, but yes we are lucky,
Gitee in China is certainly robust, but when you think about the sponsorship system, it's closer to an incubation environment for corporate ecosystems. There are a lot of public codes intended for national projects or large enterprise collaborations, so it's actually good for grasping Chinese tech trends. I sometimes find it fascinating how free the Western GitHub system can be.
It really makes me realize just how different cultures and values can be.
Sometimes I feel like I want to be as free as you all are, but I also recognize that my own biases are deeply ingrained. There's a line in Demian that goes, 'The bird fights its way out of the egg.' It makes me strongly feel just how narrow my world really is
I think this is conflating opensource-corporate and english-non-english.
If you ask american/european/english-speaking developers about coding, it will mostly be about/in the context of corporate environments rather than open source too! The majority do not actively or primarily contribute to open source projects, but instead corporate environments as well.
In an alternative timeline where the lingua franca isn't english, I can still see open source culture exist; I don't think the desire to publish and cooperate in public is an inherently "western" culture. It will also run into the same conflict of interest between Open-Source and Corporate: one prefers transparency and full-disclosure, the other prefers control in the interest of minimizing risk.
You're right. Ultimately, the absolute number of developers matters a lot. But when it comes to coding style and paradigms, it's overwhelmingly dominated by the English-speaking world.
For example, object-oriented programming or conditional statements generally follow a What -> Action -> Target order. But my native grammar follows a What -> Target -> Action order. So I have to translate SOV logic into SVO code syntax.
The reality is that English speakers are numerous, Japanese and Korean speakers are relatively few, and while Chinese speakers are quite numerous, there's still some cognitive load due to differences in thought patterns. It's almost like a difference in the sheer volume of accessible knowledge.
Due to the cumulative cost of translation, this feels like a bigger hurdle than people realize.
So sometimes language gives a sense of identity tied to 'ethnicity' and 'nation,' but when it comes to the competition for knowledge, I feel that the number of native speakers matters more. There are points where I agree with you, and points where I don't. It's complicated
It is a distortion to frame the problem as corporate vs. open source. These corporations compete with open source but they are often sustained by it, and in any case they operate within a space that is impacted by it. A healthy open source community is generally to their benefit. The inverse is also true, to the extent that corporations support and integrate with open source, it benefits from a healthy commercial market. All too often, they take and do not give back, so many people in these comments here are pointing out the same contradiction that you have highlighted. But it is not so much a matter of predators and prey, we all share the same ecosystem.
The corporations themselves are not a monolith. Their leadership and engineering teams are made up of diverse perspectives on open source, and those perspectives can shift. These same questions are debated within the company and the balance is always shifting in a way that can either benefit or undermine open source. I'm personally skeptical for some of the reasons you described, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a better relationship to open source.
That's a Rihgt However, what I'm curious about is that this project governance feels more closed than open source, rather than truly being open source. Your point is valid too. I admit my thinking might be a bit too binary.
The Personal Computer culture in the SV developed from the counterculture in the valley: https://kbsm.org/technology/california-tech-culture-that-sha... It then hopped on the Free Software movement with redefining it as "open source" while the Internet was booming. And all of that is now being reaped by the corporations the "tech-hippies" themselves helped to create.
If anyone's interested in this: "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner and "What the Dormouse Said" by John Markoff.
Putting my nostalgia-tinted glasses on, it's sad how far we've strayed from that.
Yeah, I had Fred Turner in mind when posting. A bit dry, but comprehensive.
thanks, i will read it
Great comment. Really interesting to see "scratch your own itch" described as an "aristocratic hobby".
If the language barrier disappeared overnight, would the situation still be the same, do you think? What would an Eastern open source movement look like, and why hasn't one developed?
hmmm I'm not sure about Japan on this point, since I haven't communicated with Japanese developers very frequently.
But regarding Korea and China: in China, there's Gitee, which has a very robust open source environment, but it's not really 'Western style open source' it's more like corporate projects being made publicly available for free. In other words, companies release assignments and people gather to work on them. That's the dominant model. (And that becomes part of their employment portfolio. So it feels very much like an incubation system for corporate projects.)
For Korea, I think it's largely because the absolute number of Korean speakers is smaller than English speakers. As a result, Korea's tech infrastructure generally lags behind the English speaking world. It feels like: English trends emerge -> a few years later, once they stabilize, Korea starts adopting them!
The usual pattern here is that the people curating these English trends for Korea are Koreans who have worked at FAANG-like companies and come back, so they have a strong influence. But I don't necessarily agree with their perspectives, which is why I came here to see what the raw data from the West actually looks like.
On top of that, Korea's IT projects are mostly government-led (because the domestic market isn't that large), so the government essentially acts as a VC. And within this government-led incubation system, only the final winner takes everything. Given that kind of environment, I wonder if that's why open source doesn't really take off.
[dead]