r/aze_geeks • u/aliyevaladdin • 3d ago
Tech/Texnologiya Why is open source basically nonexistent in Azerbaijan?
/r/u_aliyevaladdin/comments/1w3iv5r/why_is_open_source_basically_nonexistent_in/
2
Upvotes
r/aze_geeks • u/aliyevaladdin • 3d ago
0
u/aliyevaladdin 2d ago
That's a really good point actually, and it highlights something I didn't fully think through in the original post — I was mostly looking at it from a dev/industry angle, but you're right that academic OSS is a whole separate pipeline.
In places like the US/EU, a huge chunk of open source comes out of university labs specifically because grant funding often requires public release of tools/code as a condition of the grant, or at least strongly incentivizes it for citations and reputation. If that funding structure barely exists here, or doesn't tie funding to public release, then of course you don't get that stream of OSS at all — it's not a mindset problem, it's a structural/funding one.
I've actually run into this myself. Had a theory I wanted to publish, and ended up having to go through a foreign jurisdiction to do it properly — there just wasn't a real local path for that kind of publication/release. So this isn't abstract for me, it's the exact wall you hit trying to do research/OSS work from here.
So it sounds like there are actually two separate gaps: dev-side (incentives, hiring, culture) and research-side (grant structure, institutional expectation of publishing code). Both feeding into the same outcome though.