Section 11.2. The Development Community

11.2. The Development Community

Since the emergence of libre software as a concept, European developers have contributed considerably to its growth. Only recently have we had evidence of how large this contribution is: the WIDI survey in 2001,^[2] the FLOSS study in 2002,^[3] and the FLOSS-US study in 2003^[4] showed that large numbers of developers declare themselves as nationals of a European country. In the case of FLOSS-US, from a sample of almost 1,500 developers, more than 900 (or about 60%) declared themselves to be living in Europe (including Russia), compared with about 405 in North America. In the FLOSS study, more than 70% of the developers were living in Europe (14% in North America). WIDI reported developers were 54% European and about 35% North American. Of course, all these studies could be biased (and at least they are with respect to language, since they all were done in English), since the respondents were self-selected in nature and the studies were not focused on geographic characterization, which was more like a side product of other characterizations. But they were conclusive about the European contribution to libre software development being quite high and, as an aggregate, incomparable to any other region worldwide.

^[2] Gregorio Robles, Hendrik Scheider, Ingo Tretkowski, and Niels Weber, "Who Is Doing It?"; http://widi.berlios.de/paper/study.html.

^[3] Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Ruediger Glott, Bernhard Krieger, and Gregorio Robles, "FLOSS Final Report, Survey of Developers"; http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/index.htm.

^[4] "Paul A. David, Andrew Waterman, and Seema Arora, "FLOSS-US The Free/Libre/Open Source Software Survey for 2003"; http://www.stanford.edu/group/floss-us/.

It is also interesting to notice the distribution of libre software developers within Europe, since not all countries are equally represented. In this respect, results from studies are variable, although some common patterns can be inferred. For instance, France and Germany seem to be the countries with a greater population of developers in absolute numbers, closely followed by the United Kingdom and Italy. According to the FLOSS study, France has the highest, with 15% of the total of respondents, followed by Germany (12%), Italy (8%), the UK, the Netherlands, and Spain (all at about 6.5%), and according to the FLOSS-US study the first country is Germany (25%), followed by the UK, France, and Russia (all close to 4%), Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy (about 3% each). WIDI results give 20% for Germany, close to 5% for France and the UK, and about 3% for the Netherlands.

These absolute figures are hardly surprising, since they match (with some exceptions) the countries with a greater population and GDP (which in general shows a certain correlation with the number of developers all around the world). But some countries are clearly overrepresented. Among them, the Netherlands is a clear case. Sweden, Spain, Poland, Switzerland, Finland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and Austria also seem to have more developers than their population or GDP would suggest. In fact, the Czech Republic and Austria are two relatively small countries that have some of the highest figures for libre software developers per capita.

A much more specific case study is the Debian project, where developers have the option of indicating their residence. Of those who registered, the figures are in line with the previously described results. Seven of the top eleven countries in November 2004 were European: Germany (151), the United Kingdom (80), France (57), Spain (37), Italy (34), the Netherlands (30), and Sweden (28). The total number of European developers is well over 400, which compares to 364 in North America (U.S. and Canada), the second-highest region in this survey.

In summary, Europe clearly has a high concentration of developers, possibly higher than any other region in the world. Within Europe, the Western countries have higher concentrations (though the Eastern countries of the Czech Republic and, to some extent, Poland, buck this trend). An area extending from the UK to Italy seems to include most of the European developers (with countries such as France, the Benelux, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic). The Nordic countries also have high concentrations (with respect to population). In Southern Europe, Spain seems to be the country with the most developers.

Although some successful libre software projects could be considered European by origin, or (in some rare cases) because almost all developers are European, this identification is tricky: libre software projects are global by nature (any developer from any part of the world can, in principle, join in). Therefore, we will not try to identify strictly European projects.

On the contrary, infrastructure to host libre software projects can easily be assigned a nationality (although usually it is open to the world). In this respect, Europe is well behind the U.S., since SourceForge and other well-known hosting sites are physically located there. But some hosting facilities do also exist in Europe, usually focused on a given national or linguistic community. As an example, we can cite BerlioOS , the largest one (http://berlios.de; in Germany, with more than 2,400 projects and almost 12,000 developers registered), Software-libre.org (http://software-libre.org; Spain, 66 projects and 234 developers), and Gna! ( http://gna.org; France, 360 projects and almost 2,000 developers). All of these figures (checked during March 2005) turn pale in comparison to SourceForge. This is one of several cases where, despite the importance of the European developer community, its infrastructure is not at the same level.