We had a cool presentation from an engineering candidate at OpenLogic yesterday. He talked to us about SVK, an Open Source project that does local mirroring of a remote Subversion, CVS, or Perforce repository.

What's really useful about this technology is that you can have your own local branch any time you want and still have a nice commit trail that you can revert, report on, track, etc. It's nice for disconnected laptops, working on a plane, or any other time where you can't have a direct, fast connection to the development repository. With a simple CLI, you can mirror a repository, create a new local branch, and starting checking in/out. When you're ready to merge back to the "real" repository, it's a simple smerge away.

It just goes to show that the Open Source community continues to do a phenomenal job of making modern software development as easy as possible. This sure beats filing paper forms for commit approval!

I've been to the OSBC conference in San Francisco three times now, but this is the first year I've talked to multiple people from Asia who were seriously interested in Open Source.

The snowball is just beginning to roll.

There's an enormous population of developers outside of the US, Europe, and South America who are starting to discover Open Source above the operating system. It's only a matter of time before they outnumber the English-speaking incumbents in the Open Source world, so will we start to see Open Source project lists conducted primarily in Chinese? Japanese? Korean?

It seems quite possible that we'll see competing projects that do pretty much the same thing but with a different culture driving them. Perhaps a Chinese copy of Struts or a Japanese flavor of Hibernate is in the cards?

This will definitely be an interesting few years.