Slowly but surely, Portland continues to garner visitors, residents, companies, and events that help solidify the area's standing as one of the leading Open Source software regions in the United States---if not the entire world.
This Thursday marked yet another step along the path toward becoming the de facto Open Source hub as the Portland area welcomed a group of dignitaries representing the “Ruby City MATSUE Project,” a concentrated effort to make the town of Matsue, Japan, the “Mecca of Ruby.”
And the Matsue Project has a very good chance of succeeding, given that one of the town's residents is none other than the creator of the Ruby coding language, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto.
After spending time in Mountain View on Wednesday with a little company called "Google," the Matsue Project team spent the day in the Portland area, meeting with well-known members and user groups of the Portland Open Source community.
On Friday, the Matsue Project group heads south to Corvallis to visit the Oregon State Open Source Lab.
The U.S. trip is part of an effort by the Matsue Project to establish peer groups for sharing and collaboration around Ruby and other Open Source efforts. Plans for a reciprocal U.S. Open Source contingent to visit Japan are already well underway.
