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Quite possibly the open-sourcing is a part of the success story. The Chinese culture is built around incessant reproducing and gradual improvement, which dates

by nine_k 2y ago

Quite possibly the open-sourcing is a part of the success story. The Chinese culture is built around incessant reproducing and gradual improvement, which dates back at least to the times of Confucius. Some think it's mindless copycatting, but it's more about learning deeply and then standing on others' shoulders. It's the "fork this" attitude that meshes quite well with open source, but is understandably infuriating for IP-licensing / patents crowd. This doesn't mean that the openness extends easily to those outside China, its culture, and especially its language though.

bpfrh 2y ago
I don't see that much opensource coming from china. For example the popular arm rockchip offerings are so bad at contributing to mainline linux or even sharing documentation that the single person supporting them dropped it due to lack of fund and being unable to get any contact to share documentation. IMHO, chinese opensource does at best the same thing many western companies do: Opensource the things that are not you secret sauce/income, or things which would benefit you if people adopt them. With the added caveat that china in generally is notorious for not abiding by patent laws and copying.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  Indeed, the Chinese often violate open source licenses and outright steal proprietary code from non-Chinese companies.
- holoduke 2y ago
  Huggingface rings a bell? 80% is coming from chinese reaearch.
- nine_k 2y ago
  I suspect that Rockchip has better documentation in Chinese, which may be not easy to locate if you're not fluent in Chinese and are not inside China. Upstreaming the kernel support has never been a breeze for any ARM designs, IIRC. But the custom kernels are GPL [1], aren't they? [1]:https://github.com/radxa/rockchip-bsp https://github.com/radxa/rockchip-bsp
- sitkack 2y ago
  > I don't see that much opensource coming from china. What you don't look for you don't see. I see a huge contribution in OSS from contributors based in China.
- miki123211 2y ago
  I think many companies in China have a different relationship with IP. They realize that people copy from each other, they will gladly copy from others and expect them to do the same, yet they realize that being hard-to-copy gives them a competitive advantage. In the west, being hard-to-copy often just means slapping a proprietary license on your software and not worrying about much else. THe "source available" model is a prime example, the software is trivial to copy in theory, but everybody knows there would be legal consequences, so nobody serious actually does it. In China, this doesn't work, so you have to obfuscate your code, build anti-reverse-engineering protections etc. This is similar to how the gaming market works in the west. There are plenty of great writeups on reverse-engineering Chinese apps and hardware, and their reverse-engineering protections are often far more elaborate than what those same apps would have if made by western companies.
- pantalaimon 2y ago
  Loongson did pretty well in getting Loongarch64 upstreamed in all kinds of open source projects
Barrin92 2y ago
>The Chinese culture is built around incessant reproducing and gradual improvement all successful cultures are, they're just divided on whether they admit it or not. Germany was late to industrialization and a lot of our businesses went to Britain under the pretense of doing business and copied chemical plant factory layouts one-to-one, but we like the "we're the country of engineers and thinkers" story much better than "we were a bit slow and ripped the British and French off". The Chinese just don't pretend. I've spent a lot of time in China and around FB's attempted Snapchat acquisition in tech circles there used to be the joke that FB is the most Chinese American company because of Zuckerberg's relentless copying. The valley works the exact same way, they're just more likely to pretend everything is the result of some boy genius making it up.
cute_boi 2y ago
I hope China don't follow all these IP/patents. They have harmed more imo.

by nine_k 2y ago

bpfrh 2y ago

I don't see that much opensource coming from china. For example the popular arm rockchip offerings are so bad at contributing to mainline linux or even sharing documentation that the single person supporting them dropped it due to lack of fund and being unable to get any contact to share documentation. IMHO, chinese opensource does at best the same thing many western companies do: Opensource the things that are not you secret sauce/income, or things which would benefit you if people adopt them. With the added caveat that china in generally is notorious for not abiding by patent laws and copying.

wakawaka28 2y ago
Indeed, the Chinese often violate open source licenses and outright steal proprietary code from non-Chinese companies.
holoduke 2y ago
Huggingface rings a bell? 80% is coming from chinese reaearch.
nine_k 2y ago
I suspect that Rockchip has better documentation in Chinese, which may be not easy to locate if you're not fluent in Chinese and are not inside China. Upstreaming the kernel support has never been a breeze for any ARM designs, IIRC. But the custom kernels are GPL [1], aren't they? [1]:https://github.com/radxa/rockchip-bsp https://github.com/radxa/rockchip-bsp
sitkack 2y ago
> I don't see that much opensource coming from china. What you don't look for you don't see. I see a huge contribution in OSS from contributors based in China.
miki123211 2y ago
I think many companies in China have a different relationship with IP. They realize that people copy from each other, they will gladly copy from others and expect them to do the same, yet they realize that being hard-to-copy gives them a competitive advantage. In the west, being hard-to-copy often just means slapping a proprietary license on your software and not worrying about much else. THe "source available" model is a prime example, the software is trivial to copy in theory, but everybody knows there would be legal consequences, so nobody serious actually does it. In China, this doesn't work, so you have to obfuscate your code, build anti-reverse-engineering protections etc. This is similar to how the gaming market works in the west. There are plenty of great writeups on reverse-engineering Chinese apps and hardware, and their reverse-engineering protections are often far more elaborate than what those same apps would have if made by western companies.
pantalaimon 2y ago
Loongson did pretty well in getting Loongarch64 upstreamed in all kinds of open source projects

Barrin92 2y ago

>The Chinese culture is built around incessant reproducing and gradual improvement all successful cultures are, they're just divided on whether they admit it or not. Germany was late to industrialization and a lot of our businesses went to Britain under the pretense of doing business and copied chemical plant factory layouts one-to-one, but we like the "we're the country of engineers and thinkers" story much better than "we were a bit slow and ripped the British and French off". The Chinese just don't pretend. I've spent a lot of time in China and around FB's attempted Snapchat acquisition in tech circles there used to be the joke that FB is the most Chinese American company because of Zuckerberg's relentless copying. The valley works the exact same way, they're just more likely to pretend everything is the result of some boy genius making it up.

cute_boi 2y ago

I hope China don't follow all these IP/patents. They have harmed more imo.