Open Source couldn’t have come from Asia
One of the greatest things about the internet is the Open Source movement. Incredible shifts in collaborative working as demonstrated by sites like GitHub are some of the greatest manifestations of this philosophy. It is exactly that kind of collaboration which requires one to work towards the “greater good” that makes me think that the right conditions to spawn an Open Source-esque movement would never have occurred in over-competitive Asia. Working in a corporation in Taiwan has provided me with insight into the type of cutthroat competitiveness that is part of the culture here. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned here is that any sort of co-operation which requires sacrifice of competitive advantage is considered naive or foolish.
One of my close Taiwanese friends says that kids here are brought up with competitive thinking from a very young age. The strategic principles detailed by the famous treatise “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu (孫子兵法) are apparently introduced in a more palatable format when kids are still in grade school. The end result of this type of upbringing is not an environment of collaborative learning, sharing, etc. It is an environment where people at the very best don’t work with each other, at the worst, work against each other. Now, scale that thinking up when it comes to a family, a company, or a country.
Where the game is always about more than the game
One thing about living in Taiwan that has taught me a lot is the strategic boundaries of games here. We recently had a team-building activity in our company. It was a challenge which divided our workers into smaller groups and the group which won would receive a small cash reward. One of the very first things the game-master brought up was something along the lines of “don’t sabotage the game for other teams.” I’m not sure if I’m too old or boring, but it was just a team-building exercise, the reward money was not substantial (less than 500 NT), so I just assumed people would appreciate the exercise for what it was and play fairly. The game-master, knowing the kind of competitive thinking of the locals, had to make her warnings up front to encourage fair play. Maybe I’ve been away from the West for too long, but I figured most people would understand the purpose of the exercise was not to win, but to extract whatever team-related lesson they were trying to impart.
As such, the game in Asia often is goes way beyond what happens on “the playing field.” In fact, I think a lot of people here spend more of their time strategizing about the meta-game (conditions, backroom stakeholders, other external forces which the spectator doesn’t get to see) than the actual “on field” action.
Extreme competitiveness ≠ Open Source
Anyway, back to the point of this post: Open Source couldn’t have come from Asia because the competitiveness ingrained in the culture here teaches the opposite lesson: don’t share working knowledge because it could help those who are not on your team, because they are / could be your competitor. This precludes “naive” doings such as releasing source code for the masses or helping somebody else improve their project. That said, I do know people here that do enjoy working on Open Source projects, but the culture here means the movement would never have started here.
Categorised as: General, Web development