original
Software Freedom, a Japanese Perspective - Part II: Managers Who Don't Understand Code and Never Coded
Decision-making figures need to understand what they decide on
In Part I we talked about what we would wish to cover, without (yet) estimating how long it would last far or how many parts in total. It started due to some recent articles [1, 2]. We wondered aloud why Japan was relatively slow to adopt GNU/Linux. The same can be said or asked about China and Korea.
"I believe much is explained in the Libreplanet-discuss post you picked up," Akira told me, citing a Techrights copy of his message. "Beyond what is written in the above article," he said, "I can point out that in Japan many managers of software system development teams cannot write code. Nevertheless they make decisions on what development tools are to be used, how components are to be split up, etc. They take away the authority to make such decisions from programmers who actually understand code."
This seems like a global problem, but there is something unique about Japan and the message told in 'Nippon'. "If you read the article carefully you can see it tells much why there have been few GNU/Linux installations in Japan," Akira noted. We'll cover this later in this series. █
Image source: Japanese Roof