Red Hat maps the open sauce world

LINUX VENDOR Red Hat has published a study it calls the Open Source Index, which presents a comparison of open source adoption and potential in 75 countries.

According to the map, there's lots of open saucery going on in China, India and Great Britain, not much in Algeria and Mauritania and sod all on Sudan or Kazakhstan. Quite why this is interesting, we're not too sure.

Compiled and analysed in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Red Hat's Open Source Index assesses countries' "open source friendliness" in terms of both current levels of activity and environment factors indicating readiness for growth.

The activity metrics used included notice of existing open source and open standards policies and the numbers of open source software users and contributors, while the environmental indices included factors that tend to promote open source adoption.

Quantitative measures of open source activity and environment were gathered in three dimensions - government, industry and community / education - and the countries were then statistically ranked, based upon their combined scores.

According to Tom Rabon, Red Hat corporate affairs vp, 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."

"The message of the benefits and value open source delivers is resonating across the globe and there are several geographies that present a great opportunity for open source adoption," he burbled.

Partly as an outgrowth of the Red Hat study, Georgia Tech has established a course on open source policy at its School of Public Policy, according to associate professor Dr. Douglass Noonan.

You can fiddle with the Open Source Index as a Google Maps application. µ