Open Source China, Open Source World

That was the title of the open source conference held last week in Guangzhou, China. The conference lasted two days, followed by a smaller conference over the weekend in Macau. I estimate there were between 200-300 people in attendance for at Guangzhou. There were also several distinguished guests from the West including Brian Behlendorf, Jim Zemlin, Mark Shuttleworth, Simon Phipps, Chris DiBona, Larry Augustin, Dirk Hohndel and others.

The first day of the conference was filled with 15-20 minute keynotes that went on all day, only breaking for a wonderful buffet lunch. The second day was split in two. A thirty person roundtable session was followed by three tracts of smaller panel discussions. Translation services were provided for the first day and the first half of the second day. In my own opinion, the translations were not very faithful, but were certainly better than nothing.

For attendees of OSCON, this was not that kind of conference. This was not a developer oriented event. There were no technical talks, no demos, no training. This was all about policy, position statements and marketing opportunities. That said, it was an excellent networking event. It’s important that those investing time, money, and political capital into open source in China have a chance to meet together and share ideas, to be recognized for their efforts, and to develop new initiatives and lay the seeds for future ones.

Personally, I enjoyed the event. I had a chance to meet with several of the individuals I had first met in Beijing earlier this year. And I finally got to be introduced to many others whom I had been hoping to find. China is all about relationships, so this sort of face time is important.

The Macau event was similar, though only for a single day. I was invited to speak there and managed to give half my talk in Mandarin and half in English. Many of the attendees had also been in Guanzhou the day before, though I also met new folks some Macau and Hong Kong.

Some things I learned include:

• The Guangzhou region is investing heavily in open source, in particular with its Linux center
• You heard of Red Flag Linux? Well, now there’s Red Office.
• Kingdee, a ERP company in Shenzhen China, also offers Apusic, a JEE middleware server, and an open source implementation of JSF called Opera Masks
• Microsoft attended, gave a short keynote, but wasn’t necessarily welcomed
• There is a small, though active, open source community in Macau
• I bumped into a Tapestry committe, Kent Tong, who lives in Macau
• ObjectWeb has joined forces with a Chinese open source middleware group (Orientware) to form OW2 (not new news, but it was talked about at the conference)
• The questions everyone (still) has are “How to we make money with open source?” and “What is the open source business model for China?”

The discussion at the middleware panel in Guangzhou was a bit more technically oriented with questions ranging from “What do you think of Inversion of Control (IoC) frameworks?” to “What does Ruby on Rails mean for Java Enterprise?” to “What’s Apache’s future in China?”. Somehow or another, Brian found himself invited to sit up front and join the session. It was fun to see the Apache founder being quizzed in Chinese about Java Enterprise software. He did make out with a pretty nifty sword though: