I’m at Lift Conference in Geneva. Yesterday Gen Kanai gave a good speech about open source activities in Asia. He introduced Mozilla’s asian activities including China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. And he explained why Asian contributions is low rather than usages. You can see Gen’s speech via as following steaming video.

In addition, I will explain more things of Korean situation . Historically open source is changed from individual (mid 1990), late 1990 big community such as KLDP, mid 2000 by bloggers, small communities. In late 2000, it will be open source business, strong communities and full time open source developers!

Gen Kanai at Lift 08

Government has supported Open Source since 2003, but it’s ridiculous thing of supporting regional linux OS, Asianux. Recently it’s hopeful to increase individual developers such as Linux, Apache, BID and Mozilla.
Gen indicated cultural and language barriers is very high, so some of code committers such as Mozilla, Apache, Gnome and KDE made a Korean public bugzilla system to teach how to make a bug, committing patches and communications with foreign contributors. And I finished Open Source Education for CE students in Cheju National University in last year.

Especially Korean Web Portals want more Open Source because they changed open source based service platform (LAM+Open Soruce Java). Daum is supporting OSS community in http://oss.daum.net and offer public FTP archive in http://ftp.daum.net. The NHN recruited Kwon, Soon Sun, a leader of the largest OSS user community KLDP.org as a open source evangelist.

Many companies, developers and students are interested in open source contribution more and more.