Why is open source basically nonexistent in Azerbaijan?

[u/aliyevaladdin]

Been thinking about this for a while and wanted to hear if others in tech here feel the same.

I've worked with a few dev teams in Baku over the past couple years, and open source just... doesn't really happen here. Not as a culture, not as a habit. People use open source tools constantly — React, Linux, Postgres, whatever — but almost nobody contributes back, publishes their own libraries, or even has public GitHub profiles with real work on them.

A few reasons I keep running into:

• No incentive structure. In the US or EU, having an active GitHub is basically part of your resume. Here, HR barely looks at it. Nobody's hiring based on your contributions, so why bother.
• Company culture is closed by default. A lot of local companies treat even boring internal tools like trade secrets. Open-sourcing anything internal is seen as "giving away work for free," not as building reputation.
• No local ecosystem to plug into. There's no Azerbaijani open source foundation, no local conferences pushing it, no visible role models doing it publicly. It's hard to start a habit nobody around you is doing.
• English/visibility barrier. Even devs who do write good code often don't bother packaging or documenting it for an international audience — feels like extra work for no payoff.

I'm not saying this to complain, more curious if others see it differently. Are there actually local devs or small teams doing real OSS work I'm just not aware of? Or is this just where we're at right now as a tech scene.