7 ms·

A Chinese copy of GitHub.com

79 points by yong 12y ago

yiransheng 12y ago
CSDN is a tech forum/news site, kinda like Techcrunch. It has been around for quite a few years. This github like thingi seems like a joint effort between CSDN and Tencent, whose open source projects (currently six of them) can be found at https://code.csdn.net/Tencent https://code.csdn.net/Tencent. Traditionally, China doesn't have a strong open source culture and Github was being blocked every now and then. Hopefully a Github clone backed by big players can change that.
- yeukhon 12y ago
  I think Github team may learn something from the Chinese (and I recall this is true in many Eastern Asian) community. Portal is essential in many popular Chinese websites. People like reading columns and discover things from headlines and visual columns. Imagine Github offers a way for organizaitons to publish news! So instead of me going to blog.mozilla.org or blog.github.com to find out what's going on, I can just subscribe to an organization, get a newsfeed of their latest releases and announcement, and highlight commits (ex: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/59 https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/59) ! I don't have time to implement this as an idea, but I think Github has that resource to implement it.
  - w1ntermute 12y ago
    I think that the popularity of portal sites in East Asian countries is tied to their high-context cultures, so I doubt they would be very popular in the low-context West. The use of highly cluttered web designs is also a distinctly East Asian phenomenon, but I'm not sure what the cultural explanation for that would be. It's especially odd to see it in Japan, where a more sparse aesthetic dominated the traditional culture.
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      You reminded me of the sheer abominable genius of the website for Ling's Cars http://www.lingscars.com/ http://www.lingscars.com/ which is one of the finest examples of this in the UK.
      - thret 12y ago
        I feel like your link should have a warning label of some kind.
        lotsofmangos 12y ago
        May cause sensory shock and temporary blindness/insanity. Do not use while driving.
    - LeonidasXIV 12y ago
      > The use of highly cluttered web designs is also a distinctly East Asian phenomenon, but I'm not sure what the cultural explanation for that would be. I'm not 100% sure either, but the explanation given in http://www.tofugu.com/2012/05/15/japanese-web-design-why-you-so-2003/ http://www.tofugu.com/2012/05/15/japanese-web-design-why-you... seems not too far off.
      - userbinator 12y ago
        I think it has to do with East Asian languages in general having a much higher information density, so their designs also reflect that. To me, that author's examples of "beautiful web design" appear relatively contentless and unfinished (except for the first one), while those he dislikes are obviously content-centric and seem far more pragmatic and useful. The bias is quite evident in that article: "One culture's clutter is another culture's useful information." Being from the East myself, I've always found the increasingly "information-averse" nature of the West to be a little odd.
      - null_ptr 12y ago
        Wow, that Tofugu site exemplifies the Hipster Phenomenon, with an always-there menu bar that takes a third of my browser window's vertical space!
  - thwarted 12y ago
    Sounds like, ahem, a browser based RSS aggregator and reader.
  - fanweixiao 12y ago
    I've worked for CSDN for 3 years, and have a few friends working for Github. The way of they made things are totally different. :+1: for follow an organization
- turingbook 12y ago
  Editor in Chief at CSDN here. CSDN is the biggest online community for developers and IT pros in China with more than 30 million registered members. Its news and discussion service part is more like HN or Reddit/programming other than Tech Crunch. And it also has services for blogging, code hosting, programming training and careers, all developers centered. The code hosting service under discussion is based on Gitlab, developed and operated by CSDN staff. Tencent became a sponsor this year. And because there are not enough open source projects and contributors in China, we are instead building user community around open source projects at first. It will be a little different with Github way.
  - haithink 12y ago
    yeah, Thank you !
  - TuxLyn 12y ago
    Any plans on adding "English" and other languages to the site ? There is some very interesting features :)
    - cm_1521 12y ago
      I am in charge of CSDN development team. We don't have a plan to make an English version yet as for now our focus is still on local open source community setup. Maybe one day when the situation is mature enough...
      - markvdb 12y ago
        Why not design internationalisation and localisation into it, and have contributors translate the ui? Shouldn't be too much of a problem. That might be an excellent way to demonstrate the power of FOSS to a small but growing community in China...
        gbraad 12y ago
        +1. Too often organisations like CSDN, 51CTO, etc believe that the Chinese market is 'totally' different and therefore needs a different approach/method. They still need to realize it is not the message itself, but 'how' you tell the message. Side note: I have been closely involved in the Chinese Fedora community; assisting and streamlining procedures within the community and getting the community members closer aligned with the project and project goals. As a project we actually haven't treated Asia or China any different from other regions, such as South America, Europe, etc.
- userbinator 12y ago
  > Traditionally, China doesn't have a strong open source culture Not "legally/officially open source" at least, but for some other definitions of "open", the culture is definitely there. :-)
  - cm_1521 12y ago
    It is partly true. That's why CSDN tried to adopt a different strategy other than Github. Quality and quantity of original open source projects in China are not good enough. As the 1st step, CSDN is trying to foster the culture. To have the IT giants, like Tencent onboard, is definitely helpful to attract more engineers to play some parts in the game.
austinz 12y ago
I wonder what sort of technologies are popular in China. Heard rumors that there was a thriving golang community there, but that's literally the extent of my knowledge.
- yeukhon 12y ago
  I don't really think there is anything special. I don't actually grow up in China as a programmer but when I was a kid PHP was a big thing due to the popularity of BBS like phpBB and Chinese's Discuz!. You can find Python, Java, C++, and .NET just like in America. Though I find (based on limited experience) Ruby is not a very popular language in China. edit: here is a list from 2012: http://www.ithome.com/html/it/25225.htm http://www.ithome.com/html/it/25225.htm chart 1, 2, 3: Shenzhen, Shahai, Bejing chart 4, 5, 6: worldwide, US, India Since many Chinese projects are system-level and scientific. Plus there is a huge gaming industry in China.
  - yiransheng 12y ago
    Another relevant chart from this very site: https://code.csdn.net/explore/projects https://code.csdn.net/explore/projects
  - laowai_time 12y ago
    Wow, those charts are really surprising. Maybe it's just because I'm a web developer and sort of walled off inside the foreigner tech scene, but in my experience most companies here (in Shanghai) seem to exist in either Java or PHP land (based on what my boss has said about hiring and job postings I've seen).
- mimighost 12y ago
  What really makes a difference is that, in China, online gaming is really huge, possibly the biggest cash cow for most of internet companies. This makes language like Go and Erlang really popular in China, for their performance in concurrency. Proof: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=erlang%2C%20golang%2C%20Redis&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=erlang%2C%20golang%2C...
hunvreus 12y ago
GitCafe is more like a straight up clone of GitHub: https://gitcafe.com/?locale=zh-CN https://gitcafe.com/?locale=zh-CN
- ausjke 12y ago
  correct, gitcafe is the real clone writtin in ruby
- dubfan 12y ago
  They've even got their own StackOverflow clone, SegmentFault: http://segmentfault.com/ http://segmentfault.com/
  - _zen 12y ago
    Wow, that is a really nice site. I'm looking at it in my iPad Mini Retina and it's way better looking than Stackoverflow.
  - hdra 12y ago
    Wow. The site seems very active. Now I see why SE is launching the non-english version of some of their sites.
- EduardoBautista 12y ago
  It even has a quote from Matz: "GitCafe is amazing!"
ChristianMarks 12y ago
It has everything--except for an ex employee to "open source" a sexual harassment and hostile workplace scandal on social media [1]. 1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/04/22/the-github-scandals-bizarre-transparency/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/04/22/the-githu...
est 12y ago
Can we stop label everything from China as "copy"? It's a hosted Gitlab service, that's all.
- polskibus 12y ago
  Or maybe we should start calling Github a SourceForge copy ;)
finalight 12y ago
the chinese really good at copying look at xiaomi phone; android phone with iOS feel
- yong 12y ago
  Well, some copies are good, some are bad. I think it depends how much problem they solved and how much improvement they contributed. The best always be copied by others.
- NaNaN 12y ago
  One thing, different styles. One world, different lives. Humans are always cloning humans.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- userbinator 12y ago
  They're really good at copying and improving. Look at the Jiayu G5; it looks like an iPhone, with the metal casing, except stainless steel instead of aluminium... running Android, with dual-SIM, expandable storage, and removable battery.
lambdasquirrel 12y ago
I used to think that the Chinese copied things that other people did because they wanted to make a living off of it. But lately I've been wondering if there's (1) a culture-wide case of not-built-here-ism, (2) a fear of doing things differently, and last but not least (3) the fact interactions in Chinese culture seem remarkably and subtlely different from interactions in Western culture. (1) explains why they would clone something as mundane (and not wildly profitable) as github (as linked elsewhere in these comments). (2) explains why I have heard Singaporean friends from school say, lets make a Singaporean Yelp! Westerners say, lets make a yelp for <different purpose>. (3) explains why they would want their own forums and "public spaces." These reasons seem as plausible (and a lot less malicious) than merely, the Chinese copy everything for fun and profit (even though there are elements of that elsewhere), and I think it's worth thinking about these differences in culture, because it helps us look into our own faults.
- hocuspocus 12y ago
  Not sure why you were downvoted, I think you're making fair points; I live in Korea and see very similar mindsets here. Another reason specific to China is that it's downright impossible for a foreign company to operate an internet service there, the required licenses are incredibly complex to acquire. For instance, in order for Microsoft to launch Azure in China, they had to partner up with the biggest Chinese hosting company (21Vianet).
  - lambdasquirrel 12y ago
    Trying to talk about these things in Western circles is kind of curious. I could make these points with my Native-born Asian friends from college just fine. Actually, I can see some of them saying these things outright. There's a weird line drawn where you can say "A Chinese copy of Github," with all the implications it entails, but you can't go further than that. In my mind, the title is inflammatory; I was borderline being apologist, and suggesting there are ways in which the West is no better, which means that no one is happy.
- HowardMei 12y ago
  IMO, it's related to the fear of failure and the social discrimination against losers. Copying and improving is the safest way to gain attractions from the public when you cannot afford the risk of being ignored. There is a business strategy called market follower strategy.
xuesj 12y ago
Any copy to China of Opensource is welcome.

79 points by yong 12y ago

CSDN is a tech forum/news site, kinda like Techcrunch. It has been around for quite a few years. This github like thingi seems like a joint effort between CSDN and Tencent, whose open source projects (currently six of them) can be found at https://code.csdn.net/Tencent https://code.csdn.net/Tencent. Traditionally, China doesn't have a strong open source culture and Github was being blocked every now and then. Hopefully a Github clone backed by big players can change that.

yeukhon 12y ago
I think Github team may learn something from the Chinese (and I recall this is true in many Eastern Asian) community. Portal is essential in many popular Chinese websites. People like reading columns and discover things from headlines and visual columns. Imagine Github offers a way for organizaitons to publish news! So instead of me going to blog.mozilla.org or blog.github.com to find out what's going on, I can just subscribe to an organization, get a newsfeed of their latest releases and announcement, and highlight commits (ex: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/59 https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/59) ! I don't have time to implement this as an idea, but I think Github has that resource to implement it.
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  I think that the popularity of portal sites in East Asian countries is tied to their high-context cultures, so I doubt they would be very popular in the low-context West. The use of highly cluttered web designs is also a distinctly East Asian phenomenon, but I'm not sure what the cultural explanation for that would be. It's especially odd to see it in Japan, where a more sparse aesthetic dominated the traditional culture.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    You reminded me of the sheer abominable genius of the website for Ling's Cars http://www.lingscars.com/ http://www.lingscars.com/ which is one of the finest examples of this in the UK.
    - thret 12y ago
      I feel like your link should have a warning label of some kind.
      - lotsofmangos 12y ago
        May cause sensory shock and temporary blindness/insanity. Do not use while driving.
  - LeonidasXIV 12y ago
    > The use of highly cluttered web designs is also a distinctly East Asian phenomenon, but I'm not sure what the cultural explanation for that would be. I'm not 100% sure either, but the explanation given in http://www.tofugu.com/2012/05/15/japanese-web-design-why-you-so-2003/ http://www.tofugu.com/2012/05/15/japanese-web-design-why-you... seems not too far off.
    - userbinator 12y ago
      I think it has to do with East Asian languages in general having a much higher information density, so their designs also reflect that. To me, that author's examples of "beautiful web design" appear relatively contentless and unfinished (except for the first one), while those he dislikes are obviously content-centric and seem far more pragmatic and useful. The bias is quite evident in that article: "One culture's clutter is another culture's useful information." Being from the East myself, I've always found the increasingly "information-averse" nature of the West to be a little odd.
    - null_ptr 12y ago
      Wow, that Tofugu site exemplifies the Hipster Phenomenon, with an always-there menu bar that takes a third of my browser window's vertical space!
- thwarted 12y ago
  Sounds like, ahem, a browser based RSS aggregator and reader.
- fanweixiao 12y ago
  I've worked for CSDN for 3 years, and have a few friends working for Github. The way of they made things are totally different. :+1: for follow an organization
turingbook 12y ago
Editor in Chief at CSDN here. CSDN is the biggest online community for developers and IT pros in China with more than 30 million registered members. Its news and discussion service part is more like HN or Reddit/programming other than Tech Crunch. And it also has services for blogging, code hosting, programming training and careers, all developers centered. The code hosting service under discussion is based on Gitlab, developed and operated by CSDN staff. Tencent became a sponsor this year. And because there are not enough open source projects and contributors in China, we are instead building user community around open source projects at first. It will be a little different with Github way.
- haithink 12y ago
  yeah, Thank you !
- TuxLyn 12y ago
  Any plans on adding "English" and other languages to the site ? There is some very interesting features :)
  - cm_1521 12y ago
    I am in charge of CSDN development team. We don't have a plan to make an English version yet as for now our focus is still on local open source community setup. Maybe one day when the situation is mature enough...
    - markvdb 12y ago
      Why not design internationalisation and localisation into it, and have contributors translate the ui? Shouldn't be too much of a problem. That might be an excellent way to demonstrate the power of FOSS to a small but growing community in China...
      - gbraad 12y ago
        +1. Too often organisations like CSDN, 51CTO, etc believe that the Chinese market is 'totally' different and therefore needs a different approach/method. They still need to realize it is not the message itself, but 'how' you tell the message. Side note: I have been closely involved in the Chinese Fedora community; assisting and streamlining procedures within the community and getting the community members closer aligned with the project and project goals. As a project we actually haven't treated Asia or China any different from other regions, such as South America, Europe, etc.
userbinator 12y ago
> Traditionally, China doesn't have a strong open source culture Not "legally/officially open source" at least, but for some other definitions of "open", the culture is definitely there. :-)
- cm_1521 12y ago
  It is partly true. That's why CSDN tried to adopt a different strategy other than Github. Quality and quantity of original open source projects in China are not good enough. As the 1st step, CSDN is trying to foster the culture. To have the IT giants, like Tencent onboard, is definitely helpful to attract more engineers to play some parts in the game.

austinz 12y ago

I wonder what sort of technologies are popular in China. Heard rumors that there was a thriving golang community there, but that's literally the extent of my knowledge.

yeukhon 12y ago
I don't really think there is anything special. I don't actually grow up in China as a programmer but when I was a kid PHP was a big thing due to the popularity of BBS like phpBB and Chinese's Discuz!. You can find Python, Java, C++, and .NET just like in America. Though I find (based on limited experience) Ruby is not a very popular language in China. edit: here is a list from 2012: http://www.ithome.com/html/it/25225.htm http://www.ithome.com/html/it/25225.htm chart 1, 2, 3: Shenzhen, Shahai, Bejing chart 4, 5, 6: worldwide, US, India Since many Chinese projects are system-level and scientific. Plus there is a huge gaming industry in China.
- yiransheng 12y ago
  Another relevant chart from this very site: https://code.csdn.net/explore/projects https://code.csdn.net/explore/projects
- laowai_time 12y ago
  Wow, those charts are really surprising. Maybe it's just because I'm a web developer and sort of walled off inside the foreigner tech scene, but in my experience most companies here (in Shanghai) seem to exist in either Java or PHP land (based on what my boss has said about hiring and job postings I've seen).
mimighost 12y ago
What really makes a difference is that, in China, online gaming is really huge, possibly the biggest cash cow for most of internet companies. This makes language like Go and Erlang really popular in China, for their performance in concurrency. Proof: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=erlang%2C%20golang%2C%20Redis&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=erlang%2C%20golang%2C...

hunvreus 12y ago

GitCafe is more like a straight up clone of GitHub: https://gitcafe.com/?locale=zh-CN https://gitcafe.com/?locale=zh-CN

ausjke 12y ago
correct, gitcafe is the real clone writtin in ruby
dubfan 12y ago
They've even got their own StackOverflow clone, SegmentFault: http://segmentfault.com/ http://segmentfault.com/
- _zen 12y ago
  Wow, that is a really nice site. I'm looking at it in my iPad Mini Retina and it's way better looking than Stackoverflow.
- hdra 12y ago
  Wow. The site seems very active. Now I see why SE is launching the non-english version of some of their sites.
EduardoBautista 12y ago
It even has a quote from Matz: "GitCafe is amazing!"

ChristianMarks 12y ago

It has everything--except for an ex employee to "open source" a sexual harassment and hostile workplace scandal on social media [1]. 1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/04/22/the-github-scandals-bizarre-transparency/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/04/22/the-githu...

est 12y ago

Can we stop label everything from China as "copy"? It's a hosted Gitlab service, that's all.

polskibus 12y ago
Or maybe we should start calling Github a SourceForge copy ;)

finalight 12y ago

the chinese really good at copying look at xiaomi phone; android phone with iOS feel

yong 12y ago
Well, some copies are good, some are bad. I think it depends how much problem they solved and how much improvement they contributed. The best always be copied by others.
NaNaN 12y ago
One thing, different styles. One world, different lives. Humans are always cloning humans.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
userbinator 12y ago
They're really good at copying and improving. Look at the Jiayu G5; it looks like an iPhone, with the metal casing, except stainless steel instead of aluminium... running Android, with dual-SIM, expandable storage, and removable battery.

lambdasquirrel 12y ago

I used to think that the Chinese copied things that other people did because they wanted to make a living off of it. But lately I've been wondering if there's (1) a culture-wide case of not-built-here-ism, (2) a fear of doing things differently, and last but not least (3) the fact interactions in Chinese culture seem remarkably and subtlely different from interactions in Western culture. (1) explains why they would clone something as mundane (and not wildly profitable) as github (as linked elsewhere in these comments). (2) explains why I have heard Singaporean friends from school say, lets make a Singaporean Yelp! Westerners say, lets make a yelp for <different purpose>. (3) explains why they would want their own forums and "public spaces." These reasons seem as plausible (and a lot less malicious) than merely, the Chinese copy everything for fun and profit (even though there are elements of that elsewhere), and I think it's worth thinking about these differences in culture, because it helps us look into our own faults.

hocuspocus 12y ago
Not sure why you were downvoted, I think you're making fair points; I live in Korea and see very similar mindsets here. Another reason specific to China is that it's downright impossible for a foreign company to operate an internet service there, the required licenses are incredibly complex to acquire. For instance, in order for Microsoft to launch Azure in China, they had to partner up with the biggest Chinese hosting company (21Vianet).
- lambdasquirrel 12y ago
  Trying to talk about these things in Western circles is kind of curious. I could make these points with my Native-born Asian friends from college just fine. Actually, I can see some of them saying these things outright. There's a weird line drawn where you can say "A Chinese copy of Github," with all the implications it entails, but you can't go further than that. In my mind, the title is inflammatory; I was borderline being apologist, and suggesting there are ways in which the West is no better, which means that no one is happy.
HowardMei 12y ago
IMO, it's related to the fear of failure and the social discrimination against losers. Copying and improving is the safest way to gain attractions from the public when you cannot afford the risk of being ignored. There is a business strategy called market follower strategy.

xuesj 12y ago

Any copy to China of Opensource is welcome.