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I think the better question would be why there are so many northern European open-source developers. Germans just stick out because they are by far the biggest group in that larger category.
As for why northern Europe? Bad weather combined with high living standards and a more socialist leaning history?
a more socialist leaning history?
In Latin America, this example is more than clear: Nations with more socialist governments (political spectrum more left-left than left-center) tend to push free software. The Venezuelan public administration works almost exclusively with free software, most of it developed in the country. Cuba's health system is fully integrated with a free software infrastructure (the only one of its kind). Even the current Mexican government (our first leftist government) is gradually moving towards open source solutions.
Europeans are generally more aware and concerned about privacy and freedom, Germany being at the top. For instance Germany has a lot laws and regulations to protect user rights. Complying with them requires free and open source most of the time. Citizens themself, or at least what appears to from the internet, care too much about their freedoms.
Source: external observation. I am not even in Europe.
I agree with you, to add my few observations. I'm Pole, living in Germany since 2017. What is characteristic here is: physical money is more than habit. Even after so time under Covid in some places w/o cash you will buy nothing. Current times pushed more people to use cards or EVEN (sic.) phone payment (nfc). People are fully sounded by insurances. Lack of willingness to risk is highly related with why in Germany rent is more common, than loan for "own flat/house". Also going more into question due to history "left side" is more popular. Same for dislike for National related things. There is reason why German police or army has so few candidates. I'd say Germany (as culture & country) is really unique, what leads to situation that many people are active in OSS.
I also notice that haha. Possibly due to their school program (maybe they talk more about software than in other places?), but I have no real clue.
Would love to know the reason too :P
I come from Germany and it's a mystery to me too. What I can tell you is that school is 100% not it. IT is heavily neglected in schools because there are barely any teachers who can use computers properly. School IT is also very Microsoft centric here. The closest thing to programming I had in school was writing VBA Macros in MS Excel, which didn't go beyond basic for loops. This was also in the last year of school and only for students who picked the technical/mathematical branch.
I heard from friends at other schools that they had better IT education, but still not great.
Haha I see. That's exactly how it happens here in Portugal too, except we have more language choices (VBA, Pascal and C# that I recall).
I wonder why this phenomenon happens π
Here in Mexico, CS careers only teach you Java, if you are lucky probably C in a few cases, mainly hardware focused fields such as electronics.
In universities?
yep. And mostly dependent on privative infrastructure. Services like institutional mail, hosting, office, communication, etc. are provided by Micro$ucks.
Damn that's really unfortunate. In uni's CS department we run a lot of free stuff ourselves, such as email, ownCloud and even package repo mirrors for a bunch of stuff (CPAN, LDP, the kernel, and a handful of distros).
uniβs CS department
Our CS department are like (we have few exception):
can't view/play whatever you sent there :c
Are you using a client? π€
Nope, just reregular web lemmy-ui.
Yeah, not sure what's up with that - but take the broken bit and open in a new window (at least desktop firefox here) and it shows the mp4 appropriately.
Which is funny, because it looks like a low-quality gif.
On mobile (on pwa) downloading the file yields me a currupt video lol. Will try on desktop in a bit.
Iβm guessing itβs to train to use commercial software for a potential job environment. That said, i havenβt touched a Microsoft officer product since the early aughts. Officer is an auto correct error, but i like it so it can stay.
The "phenomenon" I was referring to was the amount of German FOSS devs π
Possibly due to their school program
lol no
I don't imagine there's any one thing that "causes" it. High standard of living helps (so more disposable income to spend on things like computers); a technological society, in the sense that people aren't afraid of technology or of being seen as an "engineer"-type of person; a somewhat left, privacy aware population and generally more altruistic attitude than in other countries I've lived in; finally, for my list, I think there's somewhat of a Streisand effect in that there are a large number of foss developers in Germany because they see that there are a large number of foss developers in Germany.
France also seems to have a fairly strong free software culture. In general it seems like the free software movement has more of a presence outside the Anglosphere, although I'm not sure if I can pin-point a specific reason for it. I think there is a growing mistrust of the Anglo-led proprietary software industry in those areas.
