Interesting article in Computer Business Review Online. Open Source companies are urged to remain European by Matt Asay, director of the Open Source Business Conference.

I have been talking about this with quite a few people lately because my readers seemed to favor doing a show about things happening “outside the valley.” I started noticing an anti-Silicon Valley sentiment on my trips last year.

Part of it is jealousy. When so many geek dinners happen in the shadow of San Francisco it makes everyone else uneasy. But, there’s something deeper and I think this article tapped into it: money and jobs.

If you’re a geek outside of San Francisco or Redmond, it’s hard to get a job in the industry.

And, worse, if you are a fledgling company and you need to expand, if you aren’t in one of those areas it’s hard to find great potential workers.

Lots of people fight with me on this one, but the culture in the valley is really unique too. Geeks go there and they don’t want to leave because everywhere around them they hear people talking tech — it’s an addictive culture for someone who just wants to build stuff. I didn’t sense the same culture in Europe until I got to a conference. I didn’t see people working on computers in cafes or on the trains the way I do in California — and when I did I never saw someone running a compiler like I find in California or Redmond. I didn’t see “maker behavior” until I got to the conference sites. I’ll have to do a lot better at explaining what I mean, but you can sense it when you go to a restaurant.

One thing I also notice is that in California smoking isn’t allowed. Anywhere. Most geeks that I know don’t smoke. So, are we going to move somewhere that smoking is allowed everywhere? No.

I’ll never live in a smoking-allowed area again. Many geeks get really turned off by the smoking culture. Yeah, I know there are lots of geeks who smoke too, but they are only about 20%, even in Europe where it seems everyone smokes.

You might say it doesn’t matter, but get the non-smoking geeks alone and they’ll admit they hate the smoking culture in Europe. It is starting to change, by the way. In Ireland they had banned smoking in pubs. I hear that anti-smoking laws are spreading throughout Europe. That’s a small step to keeping tech in Europe instead of letting it come to San Francisco.