Red Hat: France is the most 'active' open source country, Moldova the least

Landing ahead of the US for "activity" in Red Hat's Open Source Index this year were these countries, in the following order: France, Spain, Germany, Australia, Finland, the UK, Norway, and Estonia. Also among the 75 countries surveyed by Red Hat and the Georgia Institute of Technology, Denmark took tenth place.

At the opposite extreme of the open source spectrum, the study found these ten countries to be the least active, in descending order: Algeria, the Philippines, Morocco, Cameroon, Yemen, Latvia, Mauritius, Nigeria, Kenya, and Moldova.

Red Hat's activity index measures the amount of open source now present in a country based partly on existing open source and open standards policies, along with numbers of users and producers of open source software. The annual survey also ranks countries on environmental factors that "may further, or coexist with, open source activity," including a high number of Internet users.

But a country's index scores for activity and environment can fall quite far apart from each other indeed. In spite of its rather lowly ninth place ranking for open source activity, the US was bested this year only by Sweden for open source environment, for example.

Although the small Eastern European nation of Moldova ended dead last for activity, it ranked 34th for environment. And regardless of its status as a software development outsourcing hotbed, India took only 23rd place for activity and 53rd place for environment. Yet Ireland, another big outsourcer, rated 19th for both activity and environment.

The survey results also broke out the two main scores into separate categories for the six areas of government, industry, and community education activity; and government, industry, and community education environment.

France, the most active country overall, also earned first place for government activity. But on community education, France ranked third, and on industry activity, only 25th.

The US took second place on community education activity and 13th on industry activity, doing better than France on both those measures. But on government activity, the US -- with its ranking of 28 -- fared far worse than France and a lot of other nations.

Yet the intent behind the survey is to spur global collaboration, not competition. "Red Hat hopes the Open Source Index will serve as a resource for those within the open source community along with others who are curious about open source to start building relationships and further foster worldwide open source growth," said Red Hat VP for Corporate Affairs Tom Rabon, in a statement earlier this week.

Red Hat's annual Open Source Index uses a framework developed by researchers at Georgia Tech.

Also this week, Red Hat announced plans to hold a virtual event called the Open Source Cloud Computing Forum on July 22.