The Economics of Open Source Software

Who contributes most to Open Source software?

According to the United Nations University in 2006, it was Norway (measured per connection). The fact that it was a Northern European country did not come as a huge surprise. I've been using and sometimes contributing to open source software for the last 15 years and the number of Scandinavian names in the source code became humorous (of course, the contributors could have been from Minnesota :-).

The linked article says:

"Researchers compared the number of open source mailing list postings from different countries with the Internet penetration of each country. When ordered by this metric, Western Europe came out on top."

So, here's some original research. I wrote a short script that takes the surnames of the contributors from the actual code base. We can use these to give us a rough estimate of where the contributor comes from (sure, Minnesota and Sweden are going to be indistinguishable, but you get the idea).

The two sources I chose were Spring and Hibernate - two projects that are used extensively at the investment banks I've worked at these last 5 years.

The results are below. Feel free to use this script on your pet projects but please publicize the results if you can.

I asked an Indian QA friend of mine why there are so few Indian names - a surprise given India's large number of IT workers. He laughed and asked why anybody would work for free.

Spring

phillip:spring henryp$ grep -r "@author" ./src/ | perl -pe s/.*\\@author//g | perl -pe "s/\\<[^\\>]*\\>//" | perl -pe s/\\,/\\n/g | perl -pe s/[^a-zA-Z\\n\ ]//g | perl -pe s/^\ *//g | perl -pe s/\ *$//g | sort | uniq | perl -pe s/.*\ //g | sort

Arendsen

Brannen

Clarka

Colyer

Cook

Davison

Donald

Dupuis

Evans

Fisher

Harrop

Hoeller

Hotaria

Johnson

Jr

Kersten

Kopylenko

Ladd

Laddad

Leau

Lewis

Olivieria

Parkinson

Pawlak

Piper

Pollack

Poutsma

Risberg

Ruiz

Sampaleanu

Smeets

Strachan

Templier

Thompson

Wiersma

Hibernate

(Slightly tidied)

phillip:hibernate_trunk henryp$ grep -r "@author" ./ | perl -pe s/.*\\@author//g | perl -pe "s/\\<[^\\>]*\\>//" | perl -pe s/\\,/\\n/g | perl -pe s/[^a-zA-Z\\n\ ]//g | perl -pe s/^\ *//g | perl -pe s/\ *$//g | sort | uniq | perl -pe s/.*\ //g | sort

Andersen

Andersen

Andersen

Anthony

Badner

Badner

Baird

Bartmann

Bauer

Bech

Bech

Beck

Benedict

Benke

Bernand

Bernard

Bissen

Bogaerta

Boguckia

Booth

Bradby

Brands

Bredesen

Burgel

Burkea

Burns

CENANI

Carreira

Chanfreau

Chanfreau

Channon

Chiba

Christian

Clow

Clowater

Colebourne

Costello

Costello

Cowan

Currie

Danciu

Davidson

Davis

DePue

Dec

Dillon

Doroskevich

Dyrkorn

Eberole

Ebersole

Erb

Fan

Feodorova

Ferentschik

Fifield

Flaherty

Fleurbaaij

Gloegl

GonzlezCadenas

Goroschenya

Graves

Greene

Gregory

Grinovero

Hanson

Hardy

Harris

Hazlewood

Hernndez

Hicks

Inger

Janssens

Johnston

Jones

Joshua

Jung

Kapanadze

Karpensteina

Kasar

Kevin

Khan

Khana

Kimptona

King

King

Kinga

Klyushnikov

Komander

Krishnan

Laakkonen

Lea

Legan

Leonard

Levinson

Lichtmaier

Lipsky

Liu

Loubyanskya

Luck

Lunsford

MAX

Mackenzie

Malolepsy

Marchignoli

Marlow

Meissner

Michi

Miller

Mlodgenski

Molitor

Moon

Mueller

Nance

Nishizawa

Obradovi

Orban

Ou

Patni

Patricio

Pedersena

Perrotta

Prasolov

Ragnarsson

Ralla

Reddy

Renuart

Richarza

RobHasselbaum

Robertson

Sandberg

Schenk

Scheper

Sin

Snaps

Stansberry

Stansberrya

Steve

Stevens

Straaten

Sturm

TextType

Travelli

Udbya

Urberg

Varszegi

Voelkl

Warski

Washio

Zamarreo

Zibrita

Zibrita

Happy (Chinese) New Year!

While my better half is away in Singapore to celebrate Chinese New Year with her mother's family, it seems an appropriate time to post analysis on China.

Dr Martin Jacques, co-founder of think-tank Demos, gives an interesting talk over at TED. Although entertaining, it promotes a very populist claim that... well, Jacque's book entitled "When China Rules the World" pretty much says it all.

After being told in the 1980s that the world business language would become that of booming Japan, I'm not a huge fan of extrapolation. So, what's the contrarian view?

Hedge fund manager and serial short seller Jim Chanos is skeptical of China's astounding growth. SeekingAlpha.com reports:

"In a TV appearance this past Friday, Chanos pointed out that construction is 60% of Chinese GDP compared to only 5% for exports. That’s huge. “We’ve seen this movie before,” he says. “Whether it was Dubai a couple of years ago, Thailand and Indonesia during the Asian crisis of the late ’90s, or Tokyo circa 1989, this always ends badly.”"

So much for economics. What's the technology angle? Jacques' presentation mentions the much praised Shanghai magnetic levitation train that can reach 350 km/h. However, he neglects to mention that it was built by two German engineering companies, Siemens and ThyssenKrupp.

What Jacques does mention that is truly contrarian is that the Chinese love their government. The world's largest private PR company, Edelman, says that 88% of Chinese trust their leaders compared to about 20% of Americans.

The Edelman Trust Barometer as it's called is taken seriously. Owen Pringle, online marketing executive at Amnesty International, told me it has been instrumental in their change of direction. He said this strong Chinese respect for their government makes it hard for a Western NGO like Amnesty to ask them to reject the authoritarian ways of their leaders and embrace Western institutions.

Aside from this one surprise, the presentation is the usual playing to the public gallery. It's interesting to note that Jacques is the former editor of the now defunct Marxism Today. So, perhaps his prognostications should be taken with a modicum of salt.