两篇关于中国Linux社区和开源发展的文章. 值得一看.

xiaozhaoz

好久没来了, 最近专注lkml, 和一个HA项目.
最近看到两篇关于老外写的文章.  觉得值得推荐. 论坛不是一个讨论Linux技术和项目的好地方. 为什么国内没有好的mail list?

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Getting to know Linux professionals in China
http://www.zdnetasia.com/blog/opensource/0,39060102,61979310,00.htm

A couple of weeks back I asked a friend, Song Kewei at the OSS Promotion Union, to tell me who he thought were the top 10 open source professionals in China. He gave me a list, which I will keep confidential, and from this list I hope to begin giving readers an idea of what type of people are the champions of the open source community in China. I essentially wrote to each person and asked some basic questions, like when did they first get into Linux, what was their first distribution, what projects do they contribute to, which sites do they troll, and if they belong to user groups.

The answers weren't what I expected, at least not considering how critical I am of open source professionals in China. The answers were what I would expect of a Westerner. The only obvious difference was when they were exposed to Linux, which for almost all were in college. This is obvious because most didn't have access to a computer before college, and even then it was restricted to computer labs, so god knows how many closet geeks out there never got a chance to come out. For one respondent, his first experiences was in 1989 with GCC, emacs and then 1991 with Softland Linux System, and then from there he began customizing his own distro. For the younger generations, it appears that Slackware and Debian were the most fun to toy around with when they were just getting their feet wet.

Disappointingly, though, was that not many contributed to projects. There is one friend of mine, Zhang Wen Song, the creator of the Linux Virtual Server Project (LVS), but for the most part many of the top professionals were more academic about their work and if they did contribute it was mainly patches. Perhaps my sample is not big enough and perhaps the open source champions revered here are more academic, as opposed to innovative.

I will, of course, stay close to these new friends and purge them for more insight into the open source community. The good thing is they said they all like to help out other users when they see a user in need. Not many belong to user groups, but they do like to troll through old Newsgroups and an occasional list or two just to see if there are any interesting challenges.

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Will cash solve China's 'community' problem?
http://www.zdnetasia.com/blog/opensource/0,39060102,61984296,00.htm
China's legacy communities are LinuxSir, China Java World, and Huihoo.

They have historically culled a group of enthusiasts that generally like to troll for interesting issues to solve in their spare time, but not much "communal" spirit was extended beyond that. However, these are the heart of the open source community in China, a community that is more devoted to work than to contributing.

Although these groups do form a foundation, they are at risk to new groups rising, groups with commercial interests, groups looking to fill the void that plagues the open source industry in China. These groups are Turbo Linux's Whitefin and Red Flag's Linux-Ren. These aren't the only groups being commercially sponsored, more are forth coming.

The government, I learnt, as well as universities are also forming communities, which are sponsored and intended to attract talented developers, or more, to point the contributors to the cause of the sponsor. The government mainly funds the top open source companies in China--those being Red Flag, Turbo Linux and Sun Wah, and these groups in turn need to devote a portion of their funding to the government initiative to promote skills in this area. It makes sense because how can the government grow its infrastructure if there is no skilled labor to develop and support it?

So, what we have now are competing communities, and those communities that existed previously will be seriously in danger of losing traffic. Why? Because of the Chinese mentality, specifically in the information technology Industry, to follow the money. These "sponsored" groups are good in one sense because they will popularize focus on "community" and draw attention to the need for skilled labor in this area, but they are also dangerous to the community because the focus is not on contribution and creativity.

neilshi

的确如此。如果要真正的参与进某一项open source项目的开发， mail list好像要更为有效的多。