(sorry this post was initially messy – when you get off a transatlantic red-eye and have fifteen minutes to copy and paste in your post, things are bound to get ugly. It should be all cleaned up now)

Mozilla kindly sent me a preliminary data set of download pledges. This data is about 2 days old but should still be more or less instructive. I hope to get more up to date data soon and will update accordingly.

According to the raw data the 20 countries where the most people – as a % of the population – pledged to download Firefox. Population figures are based on those available on Wikipedia.

Country	% of the pop that pledged to download
Anguilla	5.78
Falkland Islands	2.00
Montserrat	0.66
Andorra	0.60
Faeroe Islands	0.40
Iceland	0.35
Liechtenstein	0.27
Slovenia	0.26
Greenland	0.25
Estonia	0.25
Poland	0.23
Palau	0.20
Aruba	0.19
Netherlands	0.17
Maldives	0.17
Malta	0.17
Antigua And Barbuda	0.16
Latvia	0.15
Turks And Caicos Islands	0.15
Lithuania	0.15

On the one hand it is no surprise that many of these – about half – are small island countries with populations under 100,000 people. Moreover, 14 have populations under 500,000. Consequently, for many of these countries even a small number of absolute pledges translates into a high total percentage of the population. But I also think this says something about the economics of open source and the internet. It enables small isolated and sometimes neglected parts of the world economy to get effective, top of the line software for free, software that in turn enables them to participate in the global economy.

But things get more interesting if we strip out the countries with populations under 500,000. This picture eliminates the small countries (which are, in some ways, outliers) and allows us to focus on the rest of the world (167 countries made this list). Here are the results for the top and bottom 20 countries.

Top 20 (with population greater than 500,000
Country	Core or Gap	% of the pop that pledged to download
Slovenia	Gap	0.263
Estonia	Core	0.248
Poland	Core	0.235
Netherlands	Core	0.170
Latvia	Core	0.154
Lithuania	Core	0.146
Finland	Core	0.144
Norway	Core	0.143
Belgium	Core	0.139
Portugal	Core	0.131
Albania	Gap	0.130
Denmark	Core	0.126
Singapore	Gap	0.125
Croatia	Gap	0.124
Hungary	Core	0.123
Canada	Core	0.110
Chile	Core	0.107
New Zealand	Core	0.109
France	Core	0.106
Australia	Core	0.105

Bottom 20 (with population greater than 500,000
Country	Core or Gap	% of the pop that pledged to download
Ghana	Gap	0.001
Burundi	Gap	0.001
Kenya	Gap	0.0006
Chad	Gap	0.0006
Uganda	Gap	0.0005
Burkina Faso	Gap	0.0005
Mali	Gap	0.0005
Rwanda	Gap	0.0005
Cameroon	Gap	0.0005
Guinea	Gap	0.0004
Mozambique	Gap	0.0004
Bangladesh	Gap	0.0004
Malawi	Gap	0.0004
Niger	Gap	0.0004
Myanmar	Gap	0.0003
Sudan	Gap	0.0003
Nigeria	Gap	0.0002
Tanzania	Gap	0.0002
Dem. Republic Of The Congo	Gap	0.0002
Ethiopia	Gap	0.0001

I admit that when I wrote the post on Monday about the correlation between the pentagon’s new map and the firefox pledge download map I thought that once the per capita data was analyzed it would sharply change the outcome. The reality is, it doesn’t. Core countries are far and away dominant on the list. In the bottom half of the list (84 of the 167 countries with populations over 500,000) only 4 countries are in the core: India, China, Mongolia and South Africa. (of course as a % of Function Core, or even the worlds’ population, this is a lot of people!).

Eastern Europe is clearly an emerging open source powerhouse. Of the top 20 countries as a percentage pf population who pledged the top 3 are Eastern Europe and a total of 8 make the list. Only 4 of the countries are “non-integrated gap” countries all of which are transitioning (or arguably have transitioned, into “New Core” countries. Indeed, there is an argument that open source software allows new core countries to integrate into the core more rapidly by not only making some of the key tools that facilitate this transition more readily and cheaply, available but also by enabling the population to participate in their development thus building world class skills without the requisite FDI or multinational corporate investment.

The more grim news is at the bottom of the list. Perhaps unsurprisingly, but still another sad reminder, virtually every country on the bottom 20 is African (Bangladesh and Myanmar are the exceptions). In short, the countries most in need of this software, software that is freely available, still are least likely to have the capacity and infrastructure to download it.

Other notable placements were Venezuela (62) and Iran (77), much lower down the list than I initially suspected they would be.

Also interesting, and perhaps a possible challenge for Barnett (and the world) is that the 3 Core countries with fewest number of pledges were (in order from fewest to most) China (123), India (116) and South Africa (89)

Also, just in case you were wondering, I believe the distribution of the countries rank by percentage of population makes a power law graph :)

 

Shocker.