Red Hat today published a new study together with Georgia Tech mapping open source activity across 75 countries. Officially called the Open Source Index (OSI), the final score is made of a number of factors including policies, practices in the Government, Industry, and Community. Topping the list current is France with a score of 1.35. Spain is second at 1.07, Germany third at 1.05.
I am from Spain and I work in an opensource project paid by a German company! Both parts have a part of OpenSource culture… which is great in long term! We work on Windows, but at least OpenSource is there…
I’m amazed Papua New Guinea isn’t listed! Arf…
We like open source in France because we like the idea of having a bunch of engineers work for us for free. Plus those guys don’t go on strike, what more can we ask for?
I am from Tunisia,
It’s nice to see it the first among arabic countries and ok, it’s second in Africa.
This is thanks to the growing community of open source users.
We also do many greet events, but, why government rank is the same as Algeria ? I haven’t ever hear about their activities there !
France doesn’t like to use English words even for new words that have never existed before. They create their own that only they use.
Also a lot of their open source projects are full of comments in french, variable names in french etc.
Countries with a lot worse English skills still use English in their comments and code because they know it is the right thing to do.
I’m not a an arrogant American saying “Everyone should speak English”, but come on… in code it is pretty universal. If you program, you speak English. If you put comments other than English it is you that is being arrogant or lazy.
If the French had their way we’d see code like…
pour x dans éventail(10):
imprimez ‘Bonjour Monde!’
Come on… any programming language worth a damn has keywords in English.
::ducks::
Edited: Had to duck and put non-breaking spaces for indentation.
Edited 2009-04-22 15:47 UTC
You mean like how most non-English languages have words that, GASP, are completely different from English?
Who says it’s the right thing to do? You?
Alternatively people who expect everyone to use English in comments are lazy and arrogent.
For the time being, yes.
Maybe the project you looked at wasn’t supposed to be opensourced yet when the guys coded it? Hence the comments in their own language…