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China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub
- giancarlostoro 6y agoThis is weird, considering Mongo changed their licensing because of Chinese cloud providers if I remember correctly. I don't know if people will merely blindly trust a GitHub rival ran by a foreign government as opposed to an organic startup, the only upside is for people in countries that are not allowed on GitHub.
- stanrivers 6y agoAnd then you have to question why a foreign country would allow the new solution and not GitHub... it seems like it might be used by people used to a certain set of restrictions on them online, while others used to more liberal information flows would not.
- meiraleal 6y agoThe problem is that this organic startup is now a enterprise behemoth that can be trusted as much as CCP: Microsoft.
- ChefboyOG 6y agoI'm as skeptical of corporations as the next person, but I'm not sure Microsoft is comparable to a literal authoritarian regime.
- seneca 6y ago> The problem is that this organic startup is now a enterprise behemoth that can be trusted as much as CCP: Microsoft. Remind me again when MS killed millions of people and committed genocide? I mean, Windows is horrible, but this is a bit much. I apologize for the snark (I really don't think it's a good way to communicate) but this is a shockingly bad opinion. Comparing a bad company to a totalitarian regime that routinely abuses human rights cheapens real suffering and numbs people to real tragedy.
- wolco5 6y agoThat blue screen of death wasn't just for show.
- meiraleal 6y agoBoth of them can't be trusted the same way, at least if you are not American. If you are american ok, you have a government similar to CCP to defend you. Me? my government "willingly" shutdown open source projects to use Microsoft services. CCP never did something similar, so yeah, Microsoft can be worse than CCP in many ways.
- goldforever 6y agoCorrect!
- korethr 6y agoI can't help but wonder if such an attempt would even work. Unless I am misunderstanding the culture that makes an open source ecosystem work, a free and open exchange of information and ideas is one of those fundamental things. When a thing is broken, sometimes you have to tell an authority the horribly embarrassing fact that the thing is broken. With the CCP controlling all information flows and what is or is not fact, then ISTM that pointing out that The Peoples' Authentication Protocol is fundamentally flawed and insecure could get one disappeared just as likely as it would get the protocol fixed.
- duxup 6y agoI fear it can work. I think despite our distaste for some of the censorship that will occur when it comes to social control and etc, ultimately the meat of github and open source would be entirely functional within a CCP run context. Bug reports about a particular project? Provide a particular leader isn't embarrassed I don't expect anyone to care. I suspect they'd let the engineers fight it out and only care about the output. If anything social media faces bigger censorship concerns in China... but social media does just fine...
- tharne 6y agoI think you're right. There's been this long held belief that you can't create the level of prosperity seen in the U.S. and Europe without having a free(ish) and open society. China is showing everyone that there's another way to do it. I don't know why people keep underestimating China and the CCP.
- duxup 6y agoI'm not convinced China is anywhere near showing what you describe. I do think some systems like github can still be productive.
- zepto 6y agoIt’s worth pointing out that almost everything China has accomplished during this period of growth has been about aggressively adopting practices and technologies that were developed in Europe and the US. What happens now that they have succeeded at this, remains to be seen.
- pupdogg 6y agoI've heard the phrase that "Competition is good for business" but never in the context "Competition is good for open source"
- monadic3 6y agoThe second phrase is far more accurate than the first!
- bluGill 6y agoYou haven't followed the llvm/gcc saga then.
- wolco5 6y agoLinux vs FreeBsd? Open vs Star Office? kde vs gnome python 2 vs 3?
- muricula 6y agoPython 2 & 3 are developed/maintained by the same people. It's not really a competition.
- est 6y agoWithout Python 2 refugees Python 3 would never compromise.
- PoignardAzur 6y agoOne of these is not like the others.
- Consultant32452 6y agoIn China all source is open.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoThey want to block Github entirely because Github allows for the free flow of information (politically sensitive information, not just code) and they don't have a way of doing currently without just blocking all of Github... Which would be bad for business, and China also seems to be entering the software business in a bigger way. Actually, if you want to send large amounts of text information to users in China right now, Github is probably one of the better ways. Unfortunately probably not for long!
- golemiprague 6y agoI thought the opposite, they are afraid github will block some Chinese software because of political reasons, the same way happened now with Trump supporting companies. I can understand the reasoning and I think more and more people will try to find alternatives to big tech, especially if their politics is not aligned with SV taste du jour.
- 430scuderia 6y agoThis. I can't believe there are people on HN cheering on the CCP for strengthening its censorship. I guess those are the very people that also support it on American soil.
- onenightnine 6y agoyeah agreed, i don't think they are connecting the dots. they are missing large sections of knowledge that would protect them and the lives of those around them. but for some odd reason they have mental blocks when trying to help them out flawed framework
- 430scuderia 6y agoI mean look how fast they flagged my comment. I guess they wanted to prove my point badly. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- dang 6y ago
- LatteLazy 6y agoGit and other resources are subject to US sanctions just like anyone else. They are the logical next step since the started making a fuss over mobile phone makers, networks providers, chip makers etc.
- Iolaum 6y agoIANAL, but my understanding is that this is not true. Free software is not sanctioned. Commercial contracts that revolve around it are however. For example I think Huawei can still use AOSP, but cannot licence play services because they require a commercial agreement.
- blackrock 6y agoI think Trump just proved that America can do whatever the f*ck it wants, and the rest of the world must comply, or risk facing sanctions or gunboats. They can even force GNU open source to declare that this code is open source, except for non-democratic countries, such as China. You, as an American citizen, are still under the legal jurisdiction of the long arm of federal laws. They can probably even declare that all programs written in C or C++, are in effect, under American jurisdiction. Or even code that is encoded into x86 assembly, will be under American jurisdiction. And we know that all code written in China, uses the C programming language, as they have never developed their own technology stack. In order to avoid this fate, then China must rip out everything from their country that has American technology, and develop their own technology stack, down to the ISA (Instruction Set Architecture). They cannot even use ARM or RISC-V, they must develop their own ISA, and call it CNA-1. Then, they would have to develop their own programming language on top of this. Then their own operating system, and application software, to replace all American technology.
- riq_ 6y agoperhaps just cloning gitlab?
- RandomWorker 6y agoI mean, they could start here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab gitlab has been open-source for a while.
- IncRnd 6y agogitee.com has been around since 2009 with Alibaba as the registrar. I think that the intent is to use a Chinese owned service located inside China.
- hehehaha 6y agoCan someone point me to a significant open source effort spearheaded by China? Is Open Source active and embraced among developers in China?
- nip180 6y agoExactly. Reimplementing GitHub is not building a rival to GitHub. Like Wikipedia the value isn’t in the platform but the content hosted by the platform. Until there is a critical mass of open source software hosted Chinese GitHub provides very little value. In the west we had a critical mass of open source software and then built GitHub. This is putting the cart before the horse.
- horlux 6y agovue.js
- curuinor 6y agoIsn't vue from a hong konger? Seems not too great if the goal is PRC dominance
- llboston 6y agovue.js is not sponsored by China, although its founder Evan You is Chinese. He immigrated to the US way before starting vue.js.
- est 6y agoImagine if an American visits China and published an open source project there, then the project magically becomes Chinese?
- africanboy 6y agoBaidu and Alibaba have open source projects (RocketMQ has been donated to Apache by Alibaba http://rocketmq.apache.org http://rocketmq.apache.org) Chinese developers are the second largest group of contributors on GitHub there's also a billion and a half of them, most of them don't speak english (edit: not all of the Chinese people are developers of course) Anyway, GitHub itself it's not OSS and it's owned by Microsoft AFAIK open source contributions are not usually rewarded in China by employers, but that's true in general in Europe as well
- mschip 6y agoI'm sure they've always wanted this - but recent events likely made it a glaring necessity in their eyes. When Apple and Google app stores removed Parler it was a big deal, a bigger deal was AWS deplatforming them - a logical step further would be removing the hosted source code. I'm in no way commenting on whether it would be right or wrong, but its not hard to imagine a scenario where company morals begin to come into play here.
- muricula 6y agoI don't think the CCP cares about an obscure American social network. They know they have a dependency on American software & software distribution mechanisms, & have known far longer than Parler has been around.
- impalallama 6y agoThat's a good point. They probably want their own Github as much to control it but also so they won't suffer consequences from embargos like when Iran was blocked just recently
- mschip 6y agoThe obscure American social network is not the interesting bit of information. It's that the infrastructure and delivery corporations decided overnight not to support a customer for not aligning with their values.
- muricula 6y agoI don't think that the CCP had this sudden realization recently the same way many HN posters seem to have.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThis is why China used the GFW to grow Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, WeChat and more that provide more than sufficient infrastructure and delivery, from servers to payment processors, and currently has almost-good-enough alternatives for the silicon down to the foundry level.
- aussiegreenie 6y agoYes, I would definitely trust the CCP to host my source code /s
- pelasaco 6y agowhy not? Private repositories, probably not, but open source libs/gems definitely.
- Sprbdg 6y agoWhy would you support such a regime?
- wolco5 6y agoIt would be a great place for pirate open source.
- pelasaco 6y agoWell hosting a mirror from my open source project don't make me endorse any regime. I host my code in github and gitlab not because I endorse their countries. Your code being hosted there supports the local people there, developers that, like you and me, just want to survive and ship code.
- boringg 6y agoThe simple reason - you don't trust the host to keep your content up if it infringe's on anything deem it to infringe upon. 100% would never host anything up there.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThis is because China is afraid of what just happened to Iran. The U.S. could force MS to suddenly ban all China IP addresses. This would hamper software development for a month or so there.
- kaliali 6y agoOpen source my ass, more like a CCP controlled shit stain
- Sprbdg 6y agoIt would be stupid to use it.
- Sprbdg 6y agoIt doesn't want to more with github, it wants control over it.
- boringg 6y agoCan we just for a moment appreciate the oxymoron nature of the title of this article. That's all.
- SllX 6y agoNIH syndrome as a political ideology. I guess that’s any form of nationalism though.
- lambdasquirrel 6y agoI think that until China views the West as safe, it will continue to do these things. Chinese tend to view Westerners (Anglo/American in particular) as dodgy, yet charismatic, which is the reason for these trust issues. Rooting this attitude is an observance of the events of the last fifty years. In others’ minds, Japan was competing pretty fairly, and beating the U.S. until the Paris accords. Russia was freed from communism, only to enter a 2nd-world decline in which it was mocked in major papers like the New York Times. The Iraq occupation, and the Arab Spring reinforced the distrust that the American goal of spreading its style of governance was more about itself than the rest of the world. It made for a good story, but it did not follow through. There is, above all, the inability of the third world to modernize under the American-supported capitalist framework. The attitude given in the article is problematic because it doesn’t quite capture how Chinese engineers feel about this dynamic. It feels more like the narrative that Western Americans want to hear. I’ve gotten the impression that many feel that their government is overbearing. But I don’t get the sense that they trust what America says more. That’s a real legitimacy and credibility issue, and as we should know, politics is rooted in legitimacy. More one-sided criticism of China’s strategy is not going to help America’s case. It feels dodgy, too good to be true.
- renewiltord 6y agoHonestly, I do wonder if there is an alternative community out there. I know nothing about the Chinese Internet. One of my friends had 20k followers on his Twitter-equivalent and he seemed like an unassuming fellow. That's a large number.
- vgchh 6y agoThing is that in the big picture, it's not just that China is building a replacement for GitHub. China is building a replacement for everything that matters and accelerates their transition to be the Super Power. And they have been doing so for last 30 years, just that now it's hitting a critical mass and world is waking up to it. And I think, we, The West, have been getting it wrong. We are looking at China like a jealous neighbor, pushing back politically, through regulations and sanctions. Unfortunately that can only go so far. Thing is China is obsessed (and determined) about progressing and West is obsessed about protecting what it already has. America needs to be obsessed about creating and innovating. Hard creation and innovation on a scale never seen before - like 1000x the man-on-the-moon scale.
- seniorivn 6y agothe last time the west only managed to "win" the moon race because it was competing against financially poor and poorly managed soviet state(all key brains behind soviet space program were released from gulag just to work on it and knew that if they will not please their masters they will go back to gulag and die. the greatest motivation of all time) china now is a lot more sane people that don't mess with politics/publicity enjoy comparable levels of freedoms to the west(In a lot of cases more economic freedom but in all cases no political freedoms) which makes them much more likely to succeed competing against corrupt west as it is now
- fy20 6y agoHas anyone heard from Jack Ma yet?
- sudosysgen 6y agoThere was a video of him at a funeral a week or so ago.
- asdfsfkwqe 6y agoAre you lunatic? Any sane people will never work for CCP.
- jaimex2 6y agoHow would it rival Github if no one would be putting code into it?
- azinman2 6y agoIf they're going to do that, couldn't they at least improve upon GitHub in some meaningful way (perhaps tailored towards their culture)? Looking at its repos, it's a literal GitHub clone.... totally shameless copy.
- justinclift 6y agoIncluding "Gitee Enterprise" and similar. ;)
- Proven 6y agoHAHA Why would I participate when I never can abandon at least one backup account elsewhere? And I have to mirror my code to that backup solution in the case I get censored?
- TechnoTimeStop 6y agolol look at the dubious site name : "Restofworld" sorry China, its the Rest of the world that doesn't live under your oppression. It's so funny how they try so hard to just deny and reverse claims.
- NelsonMinar 6y agoUseful cultural accompaniment reading; Bunnie on gongkai, the culture of idea sharing that is prevalent in Shenzhen manufacturing. It's not open source but it's similar. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
- fomine3 6y agoI also found cnpm by Chinese with funny acronym. > So cnpm is meaning: Company npm. https://cnpmjs.org/ https://cnpmjs.org/
- easyas101110110 6y agoNIH syndrome?
- Animats 6y agoWe're all going to have to learn how to read comments in technical Mandarin with machine translation.
- signa11 6y agoit would be interesting to see how the phrase “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” looks when cycled through multiple translations and then back again into english.
- heratyian 6y agowow. they even copied the contribution map. Is it also cloning github repos and hosting on gitee? Why does US gov put up with this crazy wholesale censorship and copying?
- NonEUCitizen 6y agoCode on github is open source, so copying is supposed to and expected to occur. The copyrights of the various projects on github are held by their respective authors, not by the US government. These authors have chosen to permit and encourage copying of their code. Many of these authors are not even American citizens or residents.
- CodesInChaos 6y ago> Code on github is open source Not all of it. A lot of code is uploaded without specifying a license, in which case the only granted rights are those required by the github terms of service. I don't remember the details, but think the ToS mainly allowed downloads and forking on github.
- asdfsfkwqe 6y agoThe world 'open' simply does not exist in China ATM.
- qwerty456127 6y agoIt probably is going to be very slow, all in Chinese, welcome code written in Chinese characters and commented in Chinese (English is not my native language yet I believe code should always be written and commented in English).
- ggm 6y agoSometimes, people write as if the authorities in China really believe they can e.g. cease to teach people how to read and write, and speak a common tongue. I know nobody here is quite that stupid, (although it bears mentioning the more theocratically regressive nation states we have around the world do actually do this, to women) -So this is at some level only a rhetorical complaint. People need to understand that the Federated Chinese provinces and national government and the party are in a complex web of relationships, and power struggles have been a constant since before 1949. Git, and use of open-source models and methods is not deeply alien to the Chinese political system, any more than Samizdat was unique to Russia. Many of the things done during the cultural revolution depended on people passing information, sharing ideas. The chinese fear of information and passing information has a domestic, as well as an international quality is what I am trying to say here. So, there will be oppositional views on the use of Git inside China, and there will be attempts to regulate behaviour in ways which are a poor fit for what Git expects? Sure! I don't beleive this is like digital communications as a weapon of soft power, something which was actively promoted by the US department of state, and explains some of their abiding interest in Internet governance, worldwide. I think this is something the Chinese face, and brought into their own situation completely unaided. Lest we forget, Git was invented by Linus Torvalds, a citizen of an economiy in the non-aligned states.
- est 6y ago> The chinese fear of information and passing information Chinese does not fear information, it only fears "unauthorized" information flow.
- ggm 6y agoContextually yes, that's what I meant.
- PoignardAzur 6y agoThank you. There's a growing trend of people who would are otherwise vocal supporters of open-source suddenly being suspicious when a government they don't like uses open-source technology for their own gain, without asking Westerners for permission first. That's kind of the point? A lot of people act like Chinese people don't understand concepts like accountability, transparency or open dialogue and therefore any open-source tool will be doomed to fail if it isn't controlled by wiser Western interests. Open-source either is an universal concept or it isn't. Yes, the Chinese government will probably want some degree of control over their platform and will suppress free speech that threatens them, and yes, that's bad. But that doesn't mean open-source stops being a desirable thing as soon as the Chinese are doing it.
- protomyth 6y agoGitHub tied to their Social Credit System would be a scary thing. I actually wish I was joking, but given the other things it takes as inputs, this would be obvious.
- villgax 6y agoLol 996 ICU
- hg35h4 6y agoChina wants to have easy access to simply copy out of private repos rather than hack developers.
- mariuolo 6y agoCould this also be for the purpose of data attraction?
- codeisawesome 6y agoWith blackjack!
- dyzdyz010 6y agoIt’s interesting how people focusing on Github representing the spirit of free information and an open internet, while the very same Github blocking Iran developers’ work, breaking every good ‘virtue’ it calls itself stands for, not even mention it’s just another American company, bounded by American laws, which means your data is forever at stake, if yourself, your country, being targeted by the USA, or the company it self. No one can stand that right? In fact, no one should put his data solely on a hosted platform out of his control, worrying one day even not being able to access it just because he’s not one of them who controls. You can social interact, share, collaborate on such platform like GitHub, but I think it’s completely logical and understandable trying to protect your data by building your own platform or storage no? Or should Github, or the US dominate all code hosting?
- ErikBjare 6y agoGitHub is now available in Iran again: https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-github-is-fully-available-in-iran/ https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-g...
- dustinmoris 6y agoAfter Iran and many non Iranian businesses which have been cut off from GitHub because of an Iranian holiday or single employee I’m not surprised. In fact, any business critical service, such as GitHub and cloud hosting providers should have national or at least continental providers. Nobody would complain if China was to develop its own national electric grid or telecommunications infrastructure, because it seems obvious that these services shouldn’t be at the whim of a foreign nation. Guess what, cloud infrastructure powering million dollar businesses fall in the same category. The US has lost all trust to us, not just to Eastern nations but also in Europe we don’t want to expose ourselves unnecessarily anymore.
- JacKTrocinskI 6y agoI wonder if China will ever endeavor to build an OS rival to Windows.
- asddubs 6y agostrange that this is named so similarly to gitea, yet apparently completely unrelated https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/5451 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/5451
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- archibaldJ 6y ago> “Gitee’s future depends on attracting quality open source projects onto its platform, from both in and outside of China, which in turn attracts developers from both China and elsewhere to collaborate and contribute,” Kevin Xu. Many people (and I think including Xu) are not super optimistic about this. What is stifling the Chinese software microcosmos from springing up great open-source projects like linux, reactjs, keras, ror, etc, is the 996 culture[1], bad wages, and backward management that are encouraged and enforced in (most) Chinese software companies. (Perchance a feature and not a bug under the current settings of the country's econcomical and political system?) It'll be interesting to see many years down the road how much initutives like this will help to introduce a gradual paradim shift in the Chinese tech scene into a more liberaltarian one. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system https://www.zhihu.com/question/347979262/answer/1304823875 https://www.zhihu.com/question/347979262/answer/1304823875
- londons_explore 6y agoThe 996 culture might stop people working on opensource in their spare time... But it won't stop companies releasing opensource projects. So far there isn't much opensource written in China. I suspect because by keeping everything "closed source but easily stolen", it advantages innovation within China but prevents US companies using the same tech.
- archibaldJ 6y ago> So far there isn't much opensource written in China There are lots of opensource written in China. I think you have mistaken my stance on this. The Chinese open-source microcosmos are pretty cool. It's just that I have yet seen anything reactjs-great[1], let alone linux-great. Here are some github repos by the big players: Ant - https://github.com/ant-design https://github.com/ant-design TaroJS - https://github.com/NervJS https://github.com/NervJS Tencent - https://github.com/Tencent https://github.com/Tencent Baidu - https://github.com/PaddlePaddle https://github.com/PaddlePaddle ... There are also many pretty nice libraries written and maintained independently by devs (or small startups) in China. dayjs - https://github.com/iamkun/dayjs https://github.com/iamkun/dayjs GPT2 in Chinese - https://github.com/Morizeyao/GPT2-Chinese https://github.com/Morizeyao/GPT2-Chinese Wechaty - https://github.com/wechaty https://github.com/wechaty vercel ssg - https://github.com/shuding/nextra https://github.com/shuding/nextra ... [1]: For example, vuejs (https://github.com/vuejs/vue https://github.com/vuejs/vue) is closed to being reactjs-great. It is by Evan You who is now New Jersey-based (though looks like he's quite involved in the Chinese tech scene which is pretty intriguing)
- phendrenad2 6y agoMakes sense. China doesn't want any Yuan going to a US company.