Why Southeast Asia Should Embrace the Open Source Movement

In the last five years, Southeast Asia has grown to become a big consumer of modern web technologies to create digital products and services. More and more tech companies from the US are opening offices here and many with the goal to build engineering and development offices for their regional needs.

Most recently, GrabTaxi announced a US$100 million engineering office in Singapore to develop the tools and services required to feed its global growth plans. And companies such as Apple, Facebook and CloudFlare have started building out engineering teams. They join hundreds of existing multi-nationals and many more startup companies in the hunt for talent in Singapore.

The preferred technology platform for these companies remains the open web. Morgan Stanley and comScore confirmed that even on mobile phones, the killer-app remains the browser, boasting twice the audience size in the US and growing at a faster rate than apps. A trend that is visible in Southeast Asia as well.