The Grumpy Editor's Asian Tour

Your editor, having actually managed to spend a few weeks at home, once again succumbed to the allure of long-distance travel. What is life, after all, without jet lag, economy-class seats, and airline meals? The excuse this time was the combination of the Linux Foundation's Japan Linux Symposium and the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum's Korea Technical Jamboree. Both events are intended to increase communications with the Asian technical community and encourage participation in the development process. They are also an opportunity for developers from other parts of the world to learn more about what their colleagues are thinking.

This trip was your editor's second Japanese adventure, so it is interesting to look at what has changed over the intervening 16 months. The organization of the event remains about the same, down to the pizza-and-sushi party at the end of the first day. The agenda was more heavily oriented toward filesystems this time around, along with an overview of control group resource controllers by Hiroyuki Kamezawa. There was a big difference, though, in how the discussions went. Japanese audiences are notoriously quiet and unwilling to ask questions, but the attendees at the Japan Linux Symposium have gotten over this constraint. Questions and discussion abounded - and this is a good thing. Free software development does not work well if people are unwilling to ask questions or raise concerns. The fact that Japanese developers seem to be becoming more willing to participate in this way bodes well for their participation in the process as a whole.

How much are these developers participating now? Your editor did a quick and unscientific pass over the changes merged for the 2.6.28 kernel. It appears that a full 5% of those patches came from Japanese developers. If we exclude the work of one prolific developer who currently lives in Europe, it can be said that about 4% of 2.6.28 came from Japan itself. There has been a distinct increase in the amount of kernel code coming from that part of the world, and that can only be a good thing. The Linux Foundation's events in Japan (which began in the OSDL days and have been occurring regularly for a few years now) are, perhaps, producing the intended result.

Partly in recognition of the larger role now played by Japan in the free software community, the Japan Symposium will be taken to a higher level next year. The 2009 Kernel Summit will be held in Tokyo in October, followed by an expanded, three-day Symposium hosting talks by developers from all over the world. Planning for this event is just getting underway; expect the call for papers to come out early next year. It should be an interesting gathering in a fun city; your editor is already looking forward to attending.

The Korea Technical Jamboree was a lower-key gathering, held for a single afternoon on the 25th floor of a Seoul skyscraper. It lacked some of the infrastructure of the Japan Symposium (simultaneous translation, for example), but made up for it in enthusiasm. Your editor found a highly-engaged group of developers interested in talking about the technology. While much of the discussion was, surprisingly enough, in Korean, your editor was able to figure out that virtualization is high on the list of topics that this group was interested in.

There was also talk of business models and more. What there was less of, though, was talk of working with the community. From this brief encounter, your editor can guess that the Korean community is still working through the stage of figuring out what it can get from free software. Developers there seem to have, for the most part, not yet reached the point of sharing control of our free operating system and driving it in directions which better suit their needs. By their own admission, Korean developers are a little behind their Japanese counterparts in this regard, but that situation may not last for long.

One event your editor was not able to attend was FreedomHEC Taipei, held at the same time. Harald Welte was there, though, and posted a brief report:

Harald concludes that a higher Linux awareness in Taiwan should lead to better hardware support worldwide. With any luck at all, events like FreedomHEC, like those in neighboring regions, will help to create that awareness and expand our global development community.

Your editor was also unable to attend FOSS.in this year, despite a desire to return to that part of the world. FOSS.in is experimenting with a new event plan which is strongly oriented toward the production of tangible results; it has clearly been influenced by the success of the Linux Plumbers Conference. India has vast numbers of capable developers, relatively few of whom actively participate in our community now. That number has been growing, though, and events like FOSS.in have a lot to do with that change.

Finally: while your editor saw a lot of people expressing enthusiasm for Linux, many of them seemed to be doing it with Windows laptops. It seems that the value of Linux has not yet made itself felt in the desktop setting, even among those whose job it is to develop for or promote Linux. It would be interesting to know why more of this work can't move off of proprietary platforms.

Some of the answer may be related to episodes like this: your editor had rashly upgraded his laptop to a new stable distribution release (we'll call it Incredibly Irritating for the purposes of this discussion) just prior to traveling. The obligatory check to ensure that video projection still worked got forgotten this time; it had always worked before, what could go wrong this time? But it seems that this "upgrade" moved the tools needed to interface with RandR into a separate package, which it did not bother to install. So it was not possible to tell the laptop to send video out the external port.

Suffice to say that, five minutes prior to giving a talk, while disconnected from the network, one does not want to hear "you need to install this package before I'll turn on your external video port" from one's computer. Your editor will accept the blame for not having verified this functionality before traveling, but, still: things like this should Just Work, especially with a distribution which claims to have invested much energy into making such things Just Work. The presenters using Windows laptops were not having to contend with this kind of challenge.

That little glitch notwithstanding, this trip was a big success. The hospitality was amazing, interest was high, and there is always value in seeing how other groups are approaching free software. Our community continues to grow; many good things will come from that.

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