22 April 2009

Open Source activity in Romania

There is this interesting Open Source Activity Map made collaboratively by Red Hat and Georgia Tech so I had to check the status of my country, which is a very yellowish orange, very close to the bottom yellow:

[foss in romania]

At the first look I find hard to believe the "community" score is lower than "government", (or for that matter, anything in this country being worse than the government), but looking at the raw data I can understand why, we have things like 0.0000622 Linux users per capita and also can understand why the "e;industry"e; score is so good (things like the cellular network).

We have a lot of things to do, according to the environmental map, we could be closer tot he middle of the pack and the community should be much better (score 33 instead of 55).

However, thins are moving in the community part, so I will use the opportunity to congratulate the guys from the local openSUSE community for getting into legality by getting approval for the trademark usage but also tease them: we (fedora) didn't had to wait for a full month for a similar process, it was solved in a matter of minutes :D (well, it took like 3 days, but that was because we moved slow to print a piece of paper, sign it, scan and send back).

6 comments:

  1. Don't worry, that will take some time but that will come.

    I am tempted by linking this with a typically Romanian practice of saying "that can't work in Romania, maybe somewhere else, but not in Romania". I am not here to put the Romanians on trial (and I am no judge ^^) but this sentence is the typical excuse that a lot of lazy people in Romania take to not change anything. And if they don't change anything, they don't do opensource, which is relatively new. I think that a broader adoption of opensource software will be correlated with a raise of the morale and confidence of the Romanians at work.

    (All that from someone who enjoyed a lot his staying in Romania, take no offense.)

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  2. I told you on our site in Romanian, I'm saying it again in English. Signing something on paper sounds so... Romania-like. :)

    Seriously now, it was much easier for us to wait a month for a response than to receive a paper, sign it and then sending it back in Germany/USA/whatever.

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  3. Oh, how impolite of me... I forgot to say thanks for the greetings!

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  4. @Strainu: I was late with the follow-up on your blog, you don't have enabled comment notifications...

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  5. @Christophe: yup, that's Romania, for background info see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miorița

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  6. Romania is a great country - the problem is that as the Government is interested in lining its own pockets, no one is interested in collecting the right amount of taxes... then everyone complains at the lack of services and how bad the roads are... On the bright side Romania does have some of the best programmers in Europe, hence the reason Microsoft et al are here!

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