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I think comparing this culture to open source is doing a disservice to open source. "Open Source" in the West has developed a code of ethics around transparenc

I think comparing this culture to open source is doing a disservice to open source. "Open Source" in the West has developed a code of ethics around transparency, crediting authors, and contributing back. A lot of it is done without compensation out of joy. Fly-by-night companies that just scrape together a bunch of ideas and parts from competitors and ship an MVP are not "open source". They're a proprietary startup. Moreover, some companies are deliberately selling fraudulent products, including those harmful to human health. Secondly, while the scanning of cards and displaying of Facial database entries might be impressive to you (the author), you know what's impressive to me? That the Japanese operated the first Shinkansen in 1964, and since that time, there's been effectively zero accidents due to manufacturing flaws or human error in routine service. When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few seconds, it is national news. Copying technology is easy, copying safety culture is much more difficult. How likely is it that all of the fancy investments in surveillance databases and wireless entry for China's trains, will also have deeply invested in the same quality assurance that the Shinkansen has? One of the problems the author doesn't mention is the 差不多 culture that leads not to just copying, but lazy copying of the originals. I once looked at buying a Chinese brand of Louboutin-like shoes for wife, until I read dozens of online reviews about how the stitching or glue came out after a few weeks. However, the manufacturer bragged about how they studied in Italy and adopted Italian techniques of hand stitching. There are a few brands these days that have evolved and have adopted a safety or quality culture, DJI for example, is a standout example of a Chinese company innovating on brand, quality, industrial design, fit-and-finish. I think China may need a much stronger domestic legal tort system and a few class action consumer lawsuits under it's belt, before a lot of the snakeoil is cleared away. (And yes, there are a lot of snakeoil companies in the US shipping MVPs and broken products. It's a matter of degree though. This is present in many countries, but for example, I would trust a Japanese manufacturer over an American or Chinese manufacturer.)

njoro 8y ago
I think Shanzhai in many ways is a better representation of the hacker spirit than open source these days. Many successful open source projects are essentially copies of other software, including things like Linux and Git. It is only these days, when people get paid to work on open source and abandoning things on Github is more the rule than the exception, that copying has become a bad thing.
- sushid 8y ago
  I think the parent is saying that the spirit of open source doesn't mean you eschew safety or best practices, but that's what you see in Shenzhen's extreme capitalism. There are no safety regulations and competition is fierce so people can and will cut corners.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  Shanzai doesn't benefit me if I have to reverse engineer competitors. The point of open source is that forking is not a bug, it's a feature. All of the clones of Linux used to make other distributions or products are in fact, the whole point of the enterprise. Now, which Shanzai company is openingly publishing their source, Solidworks files, EDA assets so I can quickly fork their problem and make a slight tweak and ship a new version? Yes, it's in the hacker spirit, in a sense, because hackers basically find whatever things necessary to glue together a solution. But it is not in the spirit of say, the Homebrew computing club, or other famous hacker communities that kicked off the computer revolution, because these clubs actually shared their designs and intended for other people to be able to build their own. My point is, someone who is making a product by taking someone else's product, cloning most of it, changing a few bits, and then selling it, without publishing their changes so that others can replicate it, is not doing open source, and they are a more of a 'Hustler' than a 'Hacker', when I take the definition of Hacker to mean in the sense of Steve Levy's _Hackers_, or say, Richard Stallman, or the members of the Homebrew Club of the 70s and 80s. (or the modern Maker movement) To what extent, are Shenzhen hackers documenting their methods, publishing their sources, and assisting others to replicate what they've done? I see a lot of fly-by-night entrepreneurial activity, attempts to get rich quick, and while that is needed activity, I want to see more evidence of a culture of sharing information and being community minded before I'd be willing to say it is equivalent to the open source movement or old-skool hackers.
  - njoro 8y ago
    Open source isn't necessarily a big thing in DIY cultures. They might be cloning something, but they are cloning it for their own process. Even if you could get the design files chances are you couldn't produce it especially not in low numbers. It is more like, say, GNU vs. BSD. I like maker culture, but it can also be disappointing. A lot of it is just selling breakout boards and components at huge markups.
twblalock 8y ago
Go ahead and keep dismissing them as copycats, or thieves, or snake-oil salesmen while they continue to get better and better at what they are doing. By the time you realize what is really going on, they will have already won. > When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few seconds, it is national news. By the way, I was on a pretty late shinkansen last year and it was not on the news. And there have been accidents, including a derailment, although the safety record is excellent overall. There are also examples of pretty bad accidents on the local Japanese trains caused by drivers taking risks in order to avoid being late. Why are you exaggerating about the competence of the Japanese rail system?
- thromeaway1134 8y ago
  Weabooism.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  I didn't dismiss them, as I pointed out, there are examples of exemplary Chinese companies that have innovated, and at high quality (e.g. DJI) They are getting much better, but Shenzhen's get rich quick MVP culture isn't how the Germans or Japanese got to high quality products, and it isn't open source ethos. Most of the stuff being produced is not being done with the goal of sharing with others, it's being done for rapacious reasons. No one's exaggerating the competence of Japanese rail, look at the safety record of the Shinkansen going back to 1964, it is the best in the world. Corner cutting in Chinese manufacturing is well known, as it is today. Yes, it will get better in the future, just as the US started out as an IP thief stealing from Britain and corner cutting in the US is still a problem, but the way it improved is by having a rigorous, transparent legal system and regulatory framework, so that bad actors who defraud the community can be punished. If you're a Western company manufacturing something in China, and you literally don't have boots on the ground locally to oversee quality control, what's the probability you production runs will have bad yields or other problems that will be hidden and covered up, or that you'll be ripped off and receive relief if they mess up, or worse, that if your product becomes a success, it own't just be stolen in the middle of the night? Are we just going to say "oh, that's open source, if some guys raid your factory in the middle of the night and you find some of your cutting machinery missing in the morning?" This isn't about pooh poohing the accomplishments of Shenzhen, it's about hoping for the judicial and regulatory framework to mature, so if that if say, someone sells your kid a gadget with flaky lead paint, someone somewhere will get sued and not abscond off to a Yacht with their money parked in a overseas shelter. Silicon Valley isn't perfect, but if Apple sells me a phone that gives my kid cancer, you can be sure they'll be taken to court. Or if I hire a guy in SV to work on my product, and he downloads the entire software, quits, and then opens up a shop to sell a copy of it the next week, he'll probably be going to jail. We don't rely on 关系 here, we rely on legally enforceable agreements to hold people accountable and increase trust. To me, the ICO bubble exhibited the same problems. Fly by nights springing up, most of them copies, some with completely fake businesses, taking in a bunch of customers, and then delivering either something shoddy, or disappearing with the money.
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
Nowadays, "studied in Italy" just means "worked in an Italian sweatshop 100% staffed by Chinese workers".

njoro 8y ago

I think Shanzhai in many ways is a better representation of the hacker spirit than open source these days. Many successful open source projects are essentially copies of other software, including things like Linux and Git. It is only these days, when people get paid to work on open source and abandoning things on Github is more the rule than the exception, that copying has become a bad thing.

sushid 8y ago
I think the parent is saying that the spirit of open source doesn't mean you eschew safety or best practices, but that's what you see in Shenzhen's extreme capitalism. There are no safety regulations and competition is fierce so people can and will cut corners.
cromwellian 8y ago
Shanzai doesn't benefit me if I have to reverse engineer competitors. The point of open source is that forking is not a bug, it's a feature. All of the clones of Linux used to make other distributions or products are in fact, the whole point of the enterprise. Now, which Shanzai company is openingly publishing their source, Solidworks files, EDA assets so I can quickly fork their problem and make a slight tweak and ship a new version? Yes, it's in the hacker spirit, in a sense, because hackers basically find whatever things necessary to glue together a solution. But it is not in the spirit of say, the Homebrew computing club, or other famous hacker communities that kicked off the computer revolution, because these clubs actually shared their designs and intended for other people to be able to build their own. My point is, someone who is making a product by taking someone else's product, cloning most of it, changing a few bits, and then selling it, without publishing their changes so that others can replicate it, is not doing open source, and they are a more of a 'Hustler' than a 'Hacker', when I take the definition of Hacker to mean in the sense of Steve Levy's _Hackers_, or say, Richard Stallman, or the members of the Homebrew Club of the 70s and 80s. (or the modern Maker movement) To what extent, are Shenzhen hackers documenting their methods, publishing their sources, and assisting others to replicate what they've done? I see a lot of fly-by-night entrepreneurial activity, attempts to get rich quick, and while that is needed activity, I want to see more evidence of a culture of sharing information and being community minded before I'd be willing to say it is equivalent to the open source movement or old-skool hackers.
- njoro 8y ago
  Open source isn't necessarily a big thing in DIY cultures. They might be cloning something, but they are cloning it for their own process. Even if you could get the design files chances are you couldn't produce it especially not in low numbers. It is more like, say, GNU vs. BSD. I like maker culture, but it can also be disappointing. A lot of it is just selling breakout boards and components at huge markups.

twblalock 8y ago

Go ahead and keep dismissing them as copycats, or thieves, or snake-oil salesmen while they continue to get better and better at what they are doing. By the time you realize what is really going on, they will have already won. > When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few seconds, it is national news. By the way, I was on a pretty late shinkansen last year and it was not on the news. And there have been accidents, including a derailment, although the safety record is excellent overall. There are also examples of pretty bad accidents on the local Japanese trains caused by drivers taking risks in order to avoid being late. Why are you exaggerating about the competence of the Japanese rail system?

thromeaway1134 8y ago
Weabooism.
cromwellian 8y ago
I didn't dismiss them, as I pointed out, there are examples of exemplary Chinese companies that have innovated, and at high quality (e.g. DJI) They are getting much better, but Shenzhen's get rich quick MVP culture isn't how the Germans or Japanese got to high quality products, and it isn't open source ethos. Most of the stuff being produced is not being done with the goal of sharing with others, it's being done for rapacious reasons. No one's exaggerating the competence of Japanese rail, look at the safety record of the Shinkansen going back to 1964, it is the best in the world. Corner cutting in Chinese manufacturing is well known, as it is today. Yes, it will get better in the future, just as the US started out as an IP thief stealing from Britain and corner cutting in the US is still a problem, but the way it improved is by having a rigorous, transparent legal system and regulatory framework, so that bad actors who defraud the community can be punished. If you're a Western company manufacturing something in China, and you literally don't have boots on the ground locally to oversee quality control, what's the probability you production runs will have bad yields or other problems that will be hidden and covered up, or that you'll be ripped off and receive relief if they mess up, or worse, that if your product becomes a success, it own't just be stolen in the middle of the night? Are we just going to say "oh, that's open source, if some guys raid your factory in the middle of the night and you find some of your cutting machinery missing in the morning?" This isn't about pooh poohing the accomplishments of Shenzhen, it's about hoping for the judicial and regulatory framework to mature, so if that if say, someone sells your kid a gadget with flaky lead paint, someone somewhere will get sued and not abscond off to a Yacht with their money parked in a overseas shelter. Silicon Valley isn't perfect, but if Apple sells me a phone that gives my kid cancer, you can be sure they'll be taken to court. Or if I hire a guy in SV to work on my product, and he downloads the entire software, quits, and then opens up a shop to sell a copy of it the next week, he'll probably be going to jail. We don't rely on 关系 here, we rely on legally enforceable agreements to hold people accountable and increase trust. To me, the ICO bubble exhibited the same problems. Fly by nights springing up, most of them copies, some with completely fake businesses, taking in a bunch of customers, and then delivering either something shoddy, or disappearing with the money.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago

Nowadays, "studied in Italy" just means "worked in an Italian sweatshop 100% staffed by Chinese workers".