The Invisible Pinoy Open Source Majority?

Posted on February 18th, 2008. Written by Rico.

We’ve been reminded of an interesting post by Migs Paraz, a veteran of the local online community, via Twitter. To wit:

Where are the Pinoy Open Source Developers? A few years ago this was a topic at PLUG. The discussion back then was that Pinoys are too busy working. If they have free time, they would rather get a sideline for extra income… Now that there are jobs that pay you to work with open source (common with Linux system administration), is getting paid to work on the code itself far behind? There is at least one local company where people paid to hack on open source code, but this is just maintenance work as far as I can see.

Is there a Filipino company that will dare build a product as open source? Or less dramatic: build a components product out of open source components?

The comments to this post are also interesting, because they signify apparent activity in the local open source community. Yet it’s also obvious that, after nearly a year, none of the projects nor personalities cited have enjoyed any significant publicity over here. Perhaps open source is simply too irrelevant for Filipinos, who honestly have more pressing concerns in their lives.

It is clear that the local online market still has a lot of room for growth, especially when you compare the Philippines to a well-connected country like South Korea. The lack of a net-savvy local audience limits the visibility of the Pinoy Open Source community.

Still, everything here indicates that as more Filipinos go online, the chance for a vibrant local open source community to develop increases. Ultimately, for the Philippines to be able to focus on fields such as open source development, the country needs to address its fundamental societal needs first. Without the necessary stability, we will not be able to go beyond the basics.

Thus, the real question is not “Where are the Pinoy Open Source developers?”, but “How we can help the Pinoy Open Source community thrive?”

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Rico

Rico Mossesgeld is the founding editor of Technograph. Learn more about him at rico.mossesgeld.com/about.

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http://www.tongits.net Rico Zuniga

I have few open source projects, nothing enterprisey though. One is a card game development framework called Drac (http://drac-cardlib.sourceforge.net), this has been ported to various platforms including the Nokia 770 tablet device which is linux based. Another one is an open source tongits game (http://tong-its.blogspot.com) which is rather crappy compared to my current closed-source shareware tongits game (not to say that closed source software is better than open source). I also have a few small projects that I had plans to release as open source but haven’t done so yet. I also contribute code snippets through my Adobe Flex blog http://ricoonflex.wordpress.com.
Jojo Paderes

“Perhaps open source is simply too irrelevant for Filipinos, who honestly have more pressing concerns in their lives.” – Yep, this is obviously the main reason – financial constraints.

Proprietary software is still profitable compared to open source products.
The Technographist

Rico: Whoa, you’ve been pretty prolific pala! We wonder though: what entices you to participate, kahit walang obvious financial incentive din ang open source?

Jojo: We’re thinking that maybe open source developers participate for the chance to build visibility as coders. But it seems that the local online community doesn’t have enough “fans”?
http://pinoy pinoy

“But it seems that the local online community doesn’t have enough “fans”?”

Yeah, because we Filipinos are hard to please.
The Technographist

What do you mean? How exactly are we hard to please when it comes to open source development?
Arpee Ong

..pinoy coder here, i have been involved with the development of Mambo CMS, and recently shifted with some ex-Mambo/Joomla developers to MiaCMS development… I have a few unreleased CMS, Forums, Video Management systems over at code.google.com. All of which are opensource. I think by those I can consider myself a Pinoy OpenSource developer, and I know a few handful people too na pinoy OS dev din.. I think marami kame, hindi nga lang publicized because it doesnt need to be.. :P I think pinoy OS devs are underground nowadays, well at least thats how I see it being one..