Last week I attended the LinuxCon Japan conference, which was held in Yokohama – one of the great port cities of the world! There’s a terrific Ferris wheel near the conference center that lights up with different colors at night and has a digital clock in the center – a good reminder of the famous Japanese efficiency (everything here runs ON TIME)! The city is bustling and beautiful, with attractions as varied as the largest Chinatown in Japan (great food!) to the CupNoodles museum.
The conference was truly an excellent experience. It’s great to see the tremendous energy around FOSS here in Japan. There’s no question that Asian companies are taking full advantage of the innovation and game-changing opportunities that FOSS creates. For example, Dr. Kiyohito Nagata, one of the keynote speakers, talked about the opportunities that Tizen & HTML5 create for NTT docomo and other mobile carriers in Asia, and Brian Stevens from Red Hat spoke about “Breaking the Billion Dollar Barrier” as an open source company.
I participated in the Open Compliance Mini-Summit, almost a full day session on FOSS compliance, and spoke about SPDX. There seemed to be strong interest in SPDX here in Asia, and once we figure out a way to manage the time-zone differences, I believe we’ll get some on-going participation in the SPDX Group from folks here in Japan.
Armijn Hemel presented on the challenges of maintaining license and copyright data when content from FOSS projects is reused, and recommended correct file-level headers as a way that contributors and consumers can help to address this issue.
Shane Coughlan had a particularly interesting view of the ways in which FOSS has evolved over the last five years. To paraphrase Shane: Where once open source licenses were viewed (by their creators, at least) as not just as rules for use, but also as manifestos, now open source licenses manage fairness in a huge software economy. Shane views the next great challenge for the FOSS community as the need to create and manage collaboration around patents in order to maintain fairness and openness. Shane also spoke about the need to focus on governance: an end-to-end process for dealing with creative collaboration on knowledge products used by multi-national organizations.
Charley Tschoy provided deep insights into changes related to FOSS in Korea. There has been a significant increase in government agencies working to help Korean companies manage their use of FOSS. NIPA, for example, is particularly focused on helping small and medium businesses. Charley observed that the Korean legal community has begun to participate in FOSS analysis. For an interesting example, see OLIS. Charley also mentioned that the first ever FOSS Con Korea will be held this fall on November 29-30 and invited us all to attend.
Particularly interesting was the Open Source Legal panel discussion held at the end of the Mini-Summit. Panel members represented Korea, Taiwan and Japan, and Shane Coughlan moderated. When asked what challenges members of the panel faced, some clear patterns emerged.
- Legal participation and understanding is critical, but the number of lawyers with deep understanding in this space is still small in Asian countries.
- Companies need guidance provided in their native language so that individual team members can understand and address compliance requirements. Florence Ko noted that very little information is available in Chinese today.
- Most licenses are written in English. It’s not easy to translate the legal concepts into Korean, Japanese, Chinese. The challenge is not just the language, but also the differences in legal systems.
- Some panel members represented companies with divisions in multiple countries, making it critical to understand the legal environment in the different jurisdictions.
- Further, philosophies and cultures can vary across business units, making it challenging to create a governance policy that will be widely accepted.
One of the most compelling examples of how open source code and communities are being used in Asia is the OpenRelief project. Driven by their experiences after the 2011 earthquake in Japan, this team is working on “Open, modular, information solutions for disaster relief.” The Open Relief team has created a prototype of a remote-controlled model airplane with a digital camera trained to detect people, smoke and roads. The data collected by this plane can be used to see where survivors are gathered, how roads have changed, and to help determine the best routes for delivering assistance. The plane also includes a radiation detection system. The prototype was built with open source software and off-the-shelf components, including hardware purchased for around $750 US dollars. The goal is to be production-ready by end of 2012. All information about the technology will open sourced in order to make it easier for many organizations to benefit.
All in all, this was an energetic session! It’s clear that FOSS is alive and well in Asia, and contributing strongly to the economy, even as individuals and organizations work to address the related challenges. And more than that, FOSS is contributing to the well-being of our world.
