Sri Lanka becoming a FOSS giant in Asia ?
Recently Google has released a report with the statistics of the Google Summer of Code 2006 (FYI : It’s a program where Google pay for students for working on various open-source projects). According to this report Sri Lanka comes under top 20 countries with highest accepted students and highest number of applications. It seems 10 projects out of 75 projects from Sri Lanka has been accepted.
I think this is great because apart from India and China, Sri Lanka is the only other Asian country to be in the top 20. This is a clear sign of Sri Lanka is rising as a major player in the world of FOSS initiatives. It’s clear that the world recognised FOSS projects such as Apache Axis and Sahana, which were developed in the island holds a major responsibility for this success.
This could be a beginning of a new wave in Sri Lankan IT industry plus economy. FOSS projects may open up many opportunities, giving international exposure to our developers and recognition.
