Good assessment. Shanghai is certainly rocking along.

I'm in Chengdu these days at perhaps China's fastest growing software community...not the biggest yet, but its the up-and-coming place to do software. Its next to impossible to get Chinese devs to share and collaborate in ways we're used to in the U.S. Frustrating to see so much held back. The culture of not willing to informally present/collaborate in front of others, even small groups of three to five co-workers, is a huge barrier.

There are exceptions. I hosted a start-up weekend last year in Chengdu and was pleasantly surprised at how well around 60 people collaborated and presented.

Perhaps some enterprising Chinese could come up with a form of "rejection therapy" that some software devs in the West like to use to get into selling their wares. I'm not sure what this would look like. Anything that would get people to practice informal/ad-hoc openness to learn that you won't lose face, not in a friendly environ, of which there are quite a few these days.

For those not familiar with what most Chinese experienced from the moment they set foot in grade school and prepped for from birth: You're praised for getting the answer "right and fast". Not only does nothing else count but is possibly counted against you. Your classmates laugh at you for being wrong. Your teacher scolds you for not quickly regurgitating the reams of facts and quick calculations you are meant to memorize. You're measured by test scores only. This "institutional" problem is compounded after college where they find themselves in rigid work environs. Again, measured for getting correct exactly what you are told to do and only that.

In my recent struggles, I've had to "join the system". My Chengdu employees are only used to being dictated terms and measured. So I'm trying to hack the system. I put in this quarter's performance measurement worksheets that they get negative marks for not participating. Don't speak up and volunteer some idea when I ask a question, lose points, which equates to losing money. You don't lose points for being wrong, but for not speaking up at all. Just having quarterly performance worksheets is foreign to me. But its not to them. So I'm turning it on its head and measuring behavior I need them to exhibit.

What to do when you're a progressive software shop in China that wants your bright and good-hearted Chinese developers to accept "Your free, fly as high as like. Experiment. There is no punishment for getting the answer wrong! Collaborate! Iterate!"

Its changing. Mostly for the better. From 2000-2002, with my first dev shop in Shanghai, it took me two years to get my developers to come out of their shells. 10 years from now, this assessment will hopefully seem foreign to a 20-something Chinese programmer. But until then, it ain't easy.

I work at Douban, in Beijing, and I have the impression this post is only superficially spot on. Many Chinese developers are very much into open source, and have all the skills and dedication to participate fully in this movement.

Obviously they are coming later than most developed countries, and many geeks cannot afford to spend a couple of years on personal projects that are not guaranteed to yield enough game or revenue, but it is growing and promising, especially in mobile and hardware.

Many big Internet companies in China only care about profit and believe OSS is only a waste of time. Furthermore, large majority of Chinese developers are suffering from low pay, mandatory overtime, etc. The life sucks, how can I have a motivation to make contributions? IMHO, the industry even the whole society need to enhance understanding to local developers, accept their hidden individualities, make better environment in technology(fk off GFW). I believe the OSS or hacker community will be stronger as time goes on.

I'm obviously a Chinese and sorry for my English(language matters, you see? :)

Here is (one of) the organizer of BarcampHK ( as mentioned by @wyeunho ).

7+ years ago J.Aaron Farr (ASF) talks about open source in China. I put his slide online and there are still views/mentions everyday... guess what? People have the same question, and there are not much good answers.

I do agree a lot with the blogger. Without Taobao and perhaps Douban, business propelled open source movement in China by Chinese is quite a shame to be mentioned.

Just try to put my own self as an example, in 2003-2007, I do quite a lot of breeding edge OSS project digging and delivered hundreds of patches ( mainly among asterisk, qmail, horde, IMEs, bbs-related stuff... ). Jumping into the business field, I'm damned to be a pure consumer... shameful. Most of the time clients stop me from releasing the code. But from my own perspective, its more like they believe in hasten broken code with cheap labour and obscurity is the only safe. It was hourlyWTF for me.

But I still do barcamps, still stressing open source is not a biz talk but hands-on the hack. The damn thing is I, as a foreigner/guest in cities out of China (Bangkok,Tokyo,SG etc), can freely challenge super facial "open source" demonstrations, but hardly do the same in HK/GZ, where I am the organizer. Just can't be the black face too often.

In open source we need open minds. The whole Asia thing is not quite open so far. People easily feel ashamed/transgressed for technical challenges. It wastes a lot of time to just be nice and "suggesting" the damn alternatives. It is not about China, but the whole Chinese culture circle including JP/KR/SG.

Taobao is good that their engineer are both courageous to show what they can do ( such as strong urge for node.js security patch. They show how to be better and keep pushing the U.S. to acknowledge. ), and humble enough to shame what have done wrong among the community.

But these are rare kind of people. I just hope to foster more open minded ones, and the spirit of hand-on hacks.

Again, it is not about how much open source projects you know or how is your level of skill. It is more about how openness jam into the corporate culture and the civic society at large.

Great post, we still have a lot of things to do in China to improve the opensource environment

> I’ve been more than once sitting in events in Shanghai and Beijing expecting some “geek porn” (understand “very technical talks”)

A great article, but that sentence really made me cringe.

This is very interesting. I wonder if other non-English speaking countries have a hard time with OSS?

The guy that runs VeryCD is in Shanghai. You should get him to come in.