Code Liebhaber

I had the chance to go over a commercial portal/CMS solution recently (a break from the open source ones we've been dealing with). It is called Abaxx and has been developed by a German company. The software is quite good.
Seeing it triggered a thought for me, there are a lot of great German software available, some of these software are among the best in the world. What is the root reason? Well obviously these guys have a very strong history in general engineering but so do many other countries which are not necessarily as important in software and software engineering in itself is a rather different story after all.
Some research provided good conclusions. At least a good theory can be constructed based on it. A theory that I am interested in, one that focuses on the importance of individuals and the power of the subject.
In the document and many other places on the web it is evident that the German are among the most active countries doing open source development. If we consider per capita statistics, they are the first. It is very interesting to see that in the same document, it shows that IT investment in this country is not really high and the value is close to the average of the whole EU. Well what this could mean is that the government is not necessarily pushing a lot of money in this industry and the success could stem from the power of the individuals, the high open source involvement is the result of one thing and that is pure love. There are a lot of people over there who love to work on software, are very serious and should clearly believe in being able to prove many things as has been the case with companies such as SAP. Open source is about giving back to the community and man this giving back is what pushes you and your environment forward. This attitude is something that I feel is very valuable.
I wanted to do some research about their educations system related to computer science and software but I haven't found good sources yet, this study might continue later ;)
I might come up with a different theory next time and it might be focused on the relationships between good beer and good software :).
Auf Wiedersehen