Open source software is a strange beast. The idea itself has a long history of development intertwined with the birth of the Internet. For most users, it means free software, but it is more than that. It also means the software must include all the information needed for anyone to modify it, if they want to. The software license must allow the software to be modified by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Basically it allows for a piece of software to become cultural property like a folk tale; a constantly evolving and changing process that everyone can use and no one can restrict.

As you may notice elsewhere in this issue of the magazine, the Korea IT Times has a new web site. In the How To article for this month I've detailed how to make your own web site similar to ours, using the freely downloadable open source web software, Drupal. It has been a while since I worked with an open source community, so it was refreshing to work in that environment again. This also made me curious about the state of open source in Korea, so I decided to do some research about it.

The simplest place to start was with Drupal itself. There is a Drupal Korea web site located at drupal.kldp.org, but it doesn't seem to receive much traffic. On the main Drupal web site at drupal.org, a Korean language translation of the interface is registered as being last updated on December 12 of last year, which is a good sign. Frequent and recent activity in an open source project is a sign of health.

This led to the parent domain, kldp.org, which turns out to be a Korean open source community which shows active, if not high volume, work going on in the site. After some searching, it seems that all Korean open source searches lead quickly to kldp.org, so it can be reasonably assumed that it is the leading open source site in Korea.

Another strong indicator of open source activity is the presence of Linux, the ultimate open source project. There is a Linux presence in Korea, sponsored by the company HAANSOFT, which also makes Hangul, the leading Korean-language word processor. The company has banded together with Chinese and Japanese firms to create Asianux, the result of a project to create a standard Asian Linux platform.

However there are some bad signs as well. In 2006 and 2007 there were LinuxWorld expos in Korea, but this year the URL www.linuxworldkorea.com is no longer registered, and no replacement can be found.

So based on these scant facts, it seems that Korea made a lot of talk and noise about open source in 2003 and 2004, but the furor has since died down and perhaps the computing philosophy is actually losing ground. In the country where people pay membership fees to join web sites that let them download pirated movies, and feel comfortable in paying 300 or 400 won (about US$0.25) to buy virtual goods for their home pages or online gaming personas, and where computer access is often paid out by the hour in cyber cafes, perhaps freely available electronic goods are viewed with suspicion.