Shallow Research - Mistaken Conclusions
I believe whatever Mr. Garloff has his facts wrong, or his argument has very low basis in fact.
First of all, to think that there is no participation from people in Asia is certainly mistaken.
Let's start with Japan. Anybody hear of SCIM ? Look it up. AFAIK, the project originated from Japan and leading team members are from Eastern Asia. But I digress.
While you may not see earth shattering developments come from Asian teams or individuals, understand that there are whole lot of teams of open source projects which have members from all over Asia, and for that matter, Africa too. We just don't notice them because that fact is not reported on as much. If you don't believe me, go to source-forge and see the contributors names in the top ten, twenty or fifty projects.
The nature of open source development is more evolutionary, so, that could also impact the lack of news about open source efforts in Eastern Hemisphere (Africa, Asia).
Second, consider governmental efforts into Open Source, especially in countries like China and India. Ever hear of 'Red Flag Linux' ? Anybody know about the fact that Government of India has its own Linux distribution that is localized in dozens of languages ? That you can write to the government and they will mail you a disc set for free ? In these cases, the effort is more focused on 'Think Globally Act Locally' type of approach. The Open Source effort and solutions in those parts are geared towards solving local problems. The current government efforts are focused towards overcoming language barriers by developing localized fonts, localizing software and generally making the IT and the internet accessible. All this started in the nineties, while the west had a couple of decades of head start.
Third, think of the infrastructure lag. Communities in many parts of countries are just beginning to come on-line, and the government efforts to overcome language barriers are just beginning to bear fruit. As FOSS works on meeting local needs - most of the FOSS projects started to 'scratch an itch of the programmer'. FOSS solutions in those parts are just beginning to scratch the local itches - proverbially speaking, and sooner or later the results will trickle back when the solutions developed elsewhere become useful to the western consumers of FOSS.
I can state all this with confidence because I am a contributor to a free software project or two and I have also been following the FOSS developments for almost a decade, spending an hour or two every day surfing through the news-blogs geared towards FOSS development.
What I can say in conclusion is, FOSS can not yet leave Asian or African developers behind, because, they have just entered the race. Give it time. Most importantly, get your own facts and not some conclusions from someone else.