Re: [tlug] "Open source: Made in Japan?" blog

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:

 > I think that the language and culture barrier has just been keeping
 > westerners from noticing the amount of OSS work being done here.

Well, I can only speak to Ghostscript and Mule, but my experience with
Japanese OSS in those communities has been that it's open in a
legalistic sense, but not in a social sense.  Like most of Japanese
society, each Japanese patch tends to be tended like a bonsai by a
tight in-group.  (The patches themselves also seem to resemble bonsai
in their unnatural, twisted nature in some cases.)  When I say
"tight", I don't mean that they make outsiders understand that they
are not wanted.  Rather, as always in Japan joining the project is a
big deal and you will have to do a lot of fussing with "ningen kankei"
and learning local coding styles and so on.  The barrier to entry is
pretty high.

In both of those cases, the Japanese community spent many years (and
in the case of Mule, a fair amount of money) maintaining the "Japanese
patch" rather than finding a way to integrate into the mainline.