Hemos and CmdrTaco are Jeff Bates and Rob Malda, respectively, the self-described nerds from Holland, Mich., who founded the wildly popular Slashdot.org Web site, which is the white-hot center of English-language technoid discussions.
The two twentysomething wizards are enjoying the delights of Japan, like i-mode (they’re swooning over the latest little Internet phones), Akihabara (where Jeff has scored a digital camera) and anime (Rob visited a studio earlier that day).
But their main task is a presentation at LinuxWorld Japan, a show devoted to software utilizing open-source systems-that is, free programs that allow examination and customization of the source codes that make the programs run. They are also here to help kick off the Japanese version of Slashdot. The original, whose motto is “News for Nerds: Stuff That Matters,” is full of insightful and at times peevish remarks on issues like Microsoft, encryption, science, techno-politics and the Linux computer operating system. A moderator will post a “story”-an item that opens a discussion-and within hours hundreds of comments may appear. (Slashdot has a clever way of letting readers evaluate the comments so that lame ones can be filtered out.)
But there has been some question as to whether this freewheeling discussion can be exported to the land where, the saying goes, the nail sticking out gets hammered down. “It will depend on the stories,” says Rob. (Actually, I hear that bulletin-board discussions in Japan are just as unfettered as anything you’d find in the wild zones of AOL.)
Rob and Jeff are not the only open-source superstars in town. As it turns out, the exulted designer of the original version of Linux, Linus Torvalds of Finland, is in town promoting the Japanese translation of his autobiography, but he is not slated to appear at the show. In an interview with the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, however, he indicated that though Linux development is an international effort, “for some reason there is not a lot of [Linux] programming going on in Japan.” This doesn’t mean that there aren’t Linux users in Japan. Writing on Slashdot, one programmer claims that the program is more accepted here than abroad: “When I take out my Linux laptop at work, the American engineers chuckle. The Japanese engineers ask me what distribution I run and whether I have the latest version of [the file software] Nautilus.”
Though less than 8 percent of Internet servers in Japan run on Linux, the research firm IDC Japan estimates that by 2004, that number will rise to 25 percent. And at LinuxWorld Japan there was an announcement by NEC, Fujitsu and Hitachi that they were joining IBM (which itself intends to spend a billion dollars this year on Linux development) to spiff up the system to make it friendlier and more powerful for businesses.
But the LinuxWorld event itself was something of a letdown. It was held at a venue called Big Sight, a building resembling a giant weapon out of “Star Wars.” Though the Japanese members of the aforementioned alliance are represented by spacious booths, most of the real estate is taken by American companies: IBM, Intel, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq. This is pretty much an accurate reflection of the fact that in the global software market, Japan’s influence does not represent its overall techno-savvy.
Inside the booths, the companies are represented by serious-looking men in suits, and most of the visitors are also serious men in suits. (Outside the booths are young women in miniskirts who give away trinkets and try to draw you inside for the demos. Quite retro.) On the first day there was mildly brisk business but by the next day there was a ghost-town feel.
Like most trade shows, the real action is off in a corner, in this case a small warren of prefab booths donated by the U.S. firm VA Linux for grass-roots open-source enterprises. In other words, the geek preserve. Here, it’s packed shoulder-to-shoulder with enthusiasts wearing T shirts with English-language slogans like “Software Is Like Sex: It’s Better When It’s Free.”
Maybe these guys haven’t broken through to Linus Torvald’s attention, but there seems to be a lot of people in Japan doing some hardcore open-source work. While the suits might have been buzzing about the business alliance, the hot item in the Geek Corner was an advance copy of the Sony PlayStation 2 Linux development kit, consisting of a version of the operating system that runs on the PS2, a 40-gigabyte hard drive and a network attachment to take the game console online. This essentially makes the $299 toy into a very hot full-function computer. I am told that this was an underground project at Sony, but when the Linux freaks found out about it, they petitioned the company to release it. Later this month, amazingly enough, the company will ship 2,500 copies of the kit to the lucky nerds who managed to get their order in before the shipment (pre)sold out.
The tiny Slashdot Japan display is also in that corner. Sitting on a couch behind two monitors are CmdrTaco and Hemos, banging on their laptops, which enable them to monitor Slashdot much as if they were back in the States. They introduce me to Shuji Sado, a long-haired 28-year-old in charge of the Slashdot Japan project. He tells me that in the three days since its introduction, there have been more than 1,000 registrants. He is optimistic about the site’s prospects. “In the U.S, people have training for [contentious] discussion from a young age,” he says. “As open source builds here, such discussions are required here. We want to build up this culture in Japan.”
On the second day of the show, Jeff and Rob gave their presentation, and it’s a classic case of being lost in translation. The audience seems right-almost no suits-but by the time the punchlines, summarized and rendered in Japanese, go through the translation booth and into the earphones, the nerdy jokes fall flat. There’s not even much of a reaction at Jeff’s pretty funny story about how he found out by e-mail that a friend had burned down his apartment-and sent him digital pictures of his scorched possessions.
Immediately after the talk, Rob and Jeff retreat to the booth and quickly pull out their laptops. If the Japanese geeks want to make really close connections with CmdrTaco, Hemos and the geeks of America, they’ll do it in the language they all understand: code.
