[disclosure: I'm a personal friend of the author of this article.]<p>I lived in Montreal for three years, or four winters, depending upon how you count.<p>I believe that Montreal has the most important element necessary to become an open-source startup hub, namely a lot of good talent. The language barrier exists, but is not strong enough that it has hindered any open-source efforts in Montreal (as far as I've seen).<p>The main hurdle to Montreal becoming any sort of startup hub is cultural. IMHO, Montrealais are not very opportunistic in starting and pursuing business.<p>I don't think this is Montreal-specific in any way, many cities are like this.<p>I think people are inspired most of all by other people they meet in their day-to-day lives, not images on TV or in media. The current difficulty is that Montrealais have very few positive role models around them, to show how it's done. In SF or NYC, you could easily move in a social circle that contains a successful business entrepreneur. "Oh, if he could do it, then I can do that too!" But most people in Montreal don't happen to know a successful tech entrepreneur, not even as an acquaintance in passing.<p>Note that I have found that Montrealais ARE very opportunistic when it comes to <i>social</i> entrepreneurism. Witness social events The Strip Spelling Bee <a href="http://stripspellingbee.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://stripspellingbee.blogspot.com/</a> (and other productions by Perpetual Emotion Machine Productions, like Slow Dance Night), musical innovation particularly in low-fi and DIY subgeneres, and non-profit activism like Head and Hands.<p>But business ambition is regarded with skepticism at best, and is generally considered a form of elitism and lack of social consciousness.
I know this will probably cost me, but Montréal brings a whole new dimension to the question, "What language should we use?" ;-)<p>Seriously, though, I recall visiting during YAPC, and the after-hours conversations slipping between English and French (and back) mid-sentence.<p>I really enjoyed the city, but if you want to fit in with the locals, learn you some French (or English).<p>(I should add that, personally, I don't see this as a negative. My French was pretty darned rusty, but it still made things fun. And everyone was quite cool and easy-going about it, perhaps because I was an American (i.e. culturally challenged ;-) ).
"As for talented potential employees… that’s tougher"<p>No kidding. What Montreal has going is pretty impressive, but Quebec has an abnormally high personal income tax rate and the language issue is always going to hang like a cloud over it. I know everyone in Montreal speaks english, but the default is French and all public signs are too. While some Canadians will put up with that because our country is founded on playing lip service to bi-lingualism, I can see it as a massive barrier to importing American talent in.
Getting Yanks to Montreal is easy as long as (a) they are single, (b) they are married and the spouse doesn't work and there are no school-age kids or (c) the spouse knows French and there are no school-age kids. Getting a work visa at the border merely takes a CV and an offer letter. School-age kids require French schooling, and customer-facing positions require French (both of which might be show stoppers).<p>It's a great place to live and work, but we fall into one of the above categories.
I don't know for Open Source project, but I often think about leaving Montreal as it's really hard to find good co-founders and to get investments. Usually, investors have ideas on what they would like to invest and you'd have to forget your project and build theirs. Also, IMO, the french problem isn't a problem since the big majority of the startup world speaks english. For instance, if one person speaks english and 5 speaks french, the conversation will be in english as Quebec people are way better in english than the inverse.
The premise doesn't make sense to me. Open source is a business model, not a technology. How do you build a "hub" out of that?<p>I think you are arguing that familiarity with the business model is transferable across organizations, but that seems dubious. At least so far, there has never been a "hub" based on an investing or management talent pool. It's always been based on the employee talent pool -- for the Bay Area, electronics and software.<p>FYI, I'm a Montrealer by birth, San Franciscan by choice.
Perhaps. But it sure as hell won't be including any immigrant folk in it, which is quite against the spirit of free software. Any immigrant in Montreal who is even remotely into that sorta stuff that I personally know have moved onto more welcoming lands such as the US (me, and some others) or Ontario/British Columbia (several others). In my opinion, Montreal is still very much a preferred destination for francophone immigrants from impoverished nations who aren't functional in a non-francophone environment, but the English speaking folk (South Asia/China/Rest of the World, if you prefer) are usually better off elsewhere. Really pains me to say this, I gotta say ...
I've worked for a couple of startups in Montreal. Their biggest competitive advantage was always that they could do things for less. This is because wages are low and so is the cost of living.<p>I don't think that undercutting your competitors is a viable long term business strategy since you end up being cheap labor. This also discourages innovation since the focus is on copying what someone has already done and doing it for less.<p>There is already a lot of talent in Montreal but if Montreal is to become an open source startup hub, it needs to change this cheap labor mindset into one of innovation.
I didn't find any use in the article. Apparently, the useful information will be coming next week:<p>"Next week, I’ll give what I think is a potential plan for Montreal to take the lead in Open Source commercialization."<p>I hope he isn't going to ask for government money.
Glad to see there are fellow Montrealers on HN. As a totally unrelated side note, it would be nice if it was possible to create "groups" on GitHub so that smaller communities can unite their forces on open source projects. It would also make it easier to discover related projects.
I'm not sure I agree with this article, but Montreal does have one thing in it's favor when it comes to the tech industry: incredible subsidies. With the low wages and cost of living, plus gov't handouts, it can be cheaper to hire developers in Montreal than in Beijing.
Interesting discussion. I make a lot of software for Arduinos for my robots and publish it open source on my blog. I rarely get contacted from fellow Canadians (let alone fellow Montrealers). >_><p>Arduino is a super example of open source, so if Montreal were to be a "hub", that would entail that a lot more people would be excited about Open Source and would be downloading the code or getting in contact, right?<p>I find that there's not enough excitement yet. There are ways we could garner excitement, by investing in small companies, creating open source hockey players that can shoot the puck at the back of the net, and gaining more media attention, harnessing power through local politics. Long-term thinking, it may happen!
I think it's interesting that people here on HN are focusing on the pros and cons of Montreal as a city rather than the article's main point: that startup ecosystems outside of SF and (possibly) NY need to specialize to thrive. Maybe it's Open Source, maybe it's... I dunno... defense contracts, but in order to get that critical network effect, you have to be the best in <i>something</i>.