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There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people. The government just doesn’t fund it. Not directly anyway, but there’s a ton of Chinese co

by Aeolun 1y ago

There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people. The government just doesn’t fund it. Not directly anyway, but there’s a ton of Chinese companies that do.

hollerith 1y ago
>There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people. If that is true and the software is any good, you should be able to name an open-source project that we've heard of started by people living in China. DeepSeek released some models as open weights and some software for running the models. That's the only example I can think of.
- wraptile 1y ago
  China does have their own Github as gitee.com¹ which runs a fork of Gitea but it's basically dead because it's impossible to have anything like Github with the current censorship aparatus. Here's the excerpt from wiki: > On 18 May 2022, Gitee announced all code will be manually reviewed before public availability.[4][5] Gitee did not specify a reason for the change, though there was widespread speculation it was ordered by the Chinese government amid increasing online censorship in China.[4][6] 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitee
- Fade_Dance 1y ago
  I've recently been exploring PKM/knowledge management programs, and the best open source one is a Chinese project - SiYuan. I have a feeling that their collaborative hacker culture is more hardware oriented, which would be a natural extension from the tech zones where 500 companies are within a few miles of each other and engineers are rapidly popping in and out and prototyping parts sometimes within a day. Anecdotally, I've dealt with Chinese collaborative community projects in the ThinkPad space, where they have come together to design custom motherboards to modernize old ThinkPads. Of course there was a lot of software work as well when it comes to BIOS code, Thunderbolt, etc. I remember thinking how watching that project develop was like peering into another world with a parallel hacker culture that just developed... differently. Oh there's also a Chinese project that's going to modernize old Blackberries with 5G internals. Cool stuff!
amy214 1y ago
>There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people Yea exactly, there is also a lot of chinese people out there, statistically a large chunk are cool with it. Same dynamic as the US can be really - other countries see the US government and think to themselves, "I don't like these US people, look at what their government did" meanwhile US people are like "what do you mean, I don't like what the government did either". That's what a lot of Chinese people are thinking (but now allowed to say, in China criticizing the government is against their community guidelines)

by Aeolun 1y ago

There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people. The government just doesn’t fund it. Not directly anyway, but there’s a ton of Chinese companies that do.

hollerith 1y ago

>There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people. If that is true and the software is any good, you should be able to name an open-source project that we've heard of started by people living in China. DeepSeek released some models as open weights and some software for running the models. That's the only example I can think of.

wraptile 1y ago
China does have their own Github as gitee.com¹ which runs a fork of Gitea but it's basically dead because it's impossible to have anything like Github with the current censorship aparatus. Here's the excerpt from wiki: > On 18 May 2022, Gitee announced all code will be manually reviewed before public availability.[4][5] Gitee did not specify a reason for the change, though there was widespread speculation it was ordered by the Chinese government amid increasing online censorship in China.[4][6] 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitee
Fade_Dance 1y ago
I've recently been exploring PKM/knowledge management programs, and the best open source one is a Chinese project - SiYuan. I have a feeling that their collaborative hacker culture is more hardware oriented, which would be a natural extension from the tech zones where 500 companies are within a few miles of each other and engineers are rapidly popping in and out and prototyping parts sometimes within a day. Anecdotally, I've dealt with Chinese collaborative community projects in the ThinkPad space, where they have come together to design custom motherboards to modernize old ThinkPads. Of course there was a lot of software work as well when it comes to BIOS code, Thunderbolt, etc. I remember thinking how watching that project develop was like peering into another world with a parallel hacker culture that just developed... differently. Oh there's also a Chinese project that's going to modernize old Blackberries with 5G internals. Cool stuff!

amy214 1y ago

>There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people Yea exactly, there is also a lot of chinese people out there, statistically a large chunk are cool with it. Same dynamic as the US can be really - other countries see the US government and think to themselves, "I don't like these US people, look at what their government did" meanwhile US people are like "what do you mean, I don't like what the government did either". That's what a lot of Chinese people are thinking (but now allowed to say, in China criticizing the government is against their community guidelines)