The realities of Free/Libre/Open Source Software developers in Japan and Asia

A variety of individuals around the world are furthering development of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) through the Internet. Why do they participate in developers’ communities and continue to develop FLOSS? Is their treatment enough to sustain their activities? Surveys, using online questionnaires, were conducted to answer these questions to analyze the FLOSS movement sociologically. However these surveys tend to focus on developers in the West. We decided to see if there are regional differences in FLOSS development. To that end, we conducted two surveys, the FLOSS–JP survey in Japanese and the FLOSS–ASIA survey in other Asian languages. In this paper, we describe regional differences, especially among Asian and Japanese FLOSS developers and compare the results to those from Western FLOSS surveys. Detailed reports of FLOSS–JP/ASIA are available at our Web site (MRI, 2004)