When I check out a library I often peek at who made it. My general demographic "feel" is
- 40% some European or American
- 40% some dude in Siberia,
- 10% Chinese hacker in Shenzhen
- 10% some cryptic Japanese hacker
I'm always a bit surprised there are very very few South East Asians, Latin Americans, Koreans, Indians
Secondly, India is still a poor country. So open source is produced as a by-product of the commercial work you do, but it does not have the maturity of a made-for-open-source product that ends up having dubious commercial viability.
The main point of open source in under-developed economies is to put out a positive signal for hiring. So the second you've done just enough, you are looking to escape the hell that is 'unpaid open source work' and move to corporate code that might also be open-sourced. Also, the best candidates (IITians, flagship university kids, Bangalore undergrads) are hired through on-campus hiring procedures. So efforts go into improving their signaling towards those avenues, rather than publicizing your work to the entire world.
- hackers in Shenzhen are underrepresented b/c of the language barrier. There is actually a huge Chinese language ecosystem (a lot of it off Github on Gitee) that is sort of impenetrable but you come across it all the time. I said 10% just b/c typically I have no way to use their work b/c it's under-documented in English. If you zip around this map you will see lots of "Zh" islands: https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/
- Are Indian hackers working in Hindi and other regional languages?
- While I understand that it's not as financial comfortable for a programmer in Indian compared wtih the US or Europe, Chinese and Russian hackers aren't significantly better off. Your typical Chinese program is also of course worried about working for a big company and making money and all of that jazz
- "escape the hell that is 'unpaid open source work' " - I think maybe is the crux of it... Most people work on open source work b/c they enjoy it.. You're definitely not going to make a major github project used by other people just because you're looking to pad your resume.
Sidenote: I don't personally know anyone who got hired from a deliberate effort to build an open source portfolio. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone as a way to try to find a job
I know in China they typically host on Gitee - but it's in part an artifact of the national firewall. Didn't know in India it's also silo'ed off
Popular repos do not represent all of open source. People generally contribute to thing which they are interested in and/or actively using, most of the traditionally popular repos that most people come across are bleeding edge technology not being actively used by rest of the world but mostly by US/EU.
There are a lot of regional technical issues in SEA that devs need to solve, the ones that are not so valuable for rest of the world to look into.
Is this remotely true? There's just 33 million people in Siberia, it would be strange for them to dominate OS like that.
Siberia itself is not crazy; Novosibirsk is the capital of Siberia and 3rd largest city in Russia, strong engineer culture cuz of all of the natural resources around.