So, I just read Harold Welte’s blog post about the delays on OpenMoko and how it is basically a cultural issue. Their team has basically 4-5 Open Source hackers and a team of about 50-60 (I’m guessing slightly). Thus, most of these workers I’m assuming are in Taiwan and China and have rarely touched Open Source, nor have come into contact with the culture of Open Source development. Harold notes:
In the end (up to now) I have been doing tons of more things. I’ve been doing hardware related debugging, hot-fixing and consulting, providing lots of support for our internal development team, doing all the system administration, configuration and maintenance of our four physical and about 15 virtual machines (wiki, lists, gforge, svn, build server, etc.). Today I even spent a lot of time on web related issues [hey, I haven't done much web stuff since HTML4 and CSS1 came out], since we have committed to go public with our web sites public at some point.
We’ve had to teach people how to use request tracker, bugzilla, subversion, mailing lists, IRC. Those basic means of communication, natural for everyone ever involved in a FOSS project are all things that we had to bootstrap here.
Many of the things that are a complete given for me (and even us, the rest of the core team consisting of Sean, Werner, Mickey and myself) are not at all known, valued and/or respected [yet] by the various people and entities we had to relate in this project.
This problem is so very familiar to when I worked for Gopets in Korea. While my friends and colleagues there are some of my best friends, the economics and culture of Open Source had not struck. Thus, I spent so much of my time just helping people get up to speed on what is Subversion (how you need to check-in often), bugtracker (which no one used), and other forms of communication. It took much energy, but I slowly helped to convert a few people.
So, when I read Harold’s post about these issues, I immediately started to think about how to get more people into Open Source in Asia, particularly Mainland China and Taiwan.
First of all, nothing can stand-in for pure experience. But, for crash course cultural learning for developers and others, I think it should be mandatory learning to read Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software book. Oh, and guess what, the book is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 1.0 license. So, not only is it available, all the sources are available. Thus, anyone could help translate this book.
So, my question out into the ethos is, do translations of this book exist? And, if not, would anyone out there in Taiwan and China be interested in helping to translate this book? I’m really serious, this endeavour would be of huge benefit to the world of Chinese and Taiwanese companies breaking into Open Source and for companies that have some form of outsourcing. Please comment on this post if you know of a translation and/or would like help translate this book. The sources are online, so we could submit a patch to Karl Fogel.
I just emailed Karl to see if he is into these things, as you can see:
Hi Karl, first of all, your book is a classic. I have a book that I’m putting out that deals with the issues you bring out so clearly, with relation to social sciences.
However, the reason I’m emailing you is to both say hi, from Creative Commons, as I see that you book is CC BY-SA licensed. I am the community developer/open souce developer/bizdev guy for them…so so happy to see your book is under cc license.
Also, I’m interested in translations of your book, particularly into Complex and Simplified Chinese? I want to help teach some people in China about Open Source, and your book is a must read.
Do translations exist, and if not, I’m advocating this. If translations get made, would you consider linking to them and or accepting them as patches to your SVN module?
This would be amazing for outsourcing companies, etc.
You are great.
Oh, on Open Source side I’m a core developer on Inkscape and Open Clip Art Library…
Cheers!
Jon
I just sent Jon a response to his mail, but since there is this blog post too, I’ll summarize the response here:
Yes, absolutely, anyone working on translation of the book gets commit access and a subdirectory in the repository right away, and I’ll host translated versions at http://producingoss.com/ (there are a couple of other ones in progress right now). It’d be especially pleasing to see a Chinese translation; I majored in Chinese in college, and spent some time living there (Kunming, Yunnan) in the mid-1990s.
So just let me know what I can do to help, I’m at your service.
Thanks also for the nice comments on the book, Jon — it’s particularly comforting when a fellow open source developer thinks that it wasn’t completely bunk.