oschina wants to help Putin's Russia
Almost all Chinese companies will say they are neutral in Putin’s war even if they are actively selling weapons to Russia. However, there is an exception. Chinese GitHub clone, oschina, is promoting Putin’s Russia point of view on the war from the start and is announcing their “unlimited relationship” with Russian companies.
I love FOSS, free and open source software, because it put the word free first. I don’t want it to become a openly available tool for totalitarian regime to invade other country. Unlike Ukraine, Putin’s army does not have some very basic software and I don’t want them to have it.
Key Takeaways
- oschina(gitee.com) is a Chinese clone of GitHub.
- oschina will help Russia on building their clone of GitHub, gitlife.ru.
- oschina will share their open source software with Russia, and will reshape the future of open source.
Translation of the original announcement
On September 21, the SmartDev 2023 Conference hosted by Sberbank was held in the largest theater in Moscow. Xu Yong, CEO of Open Source China, the only guest from China, was invited to present a speech 《Overview of the Open Source Industry in China》in English. Xu Yong shared the current situation of China’s open source industry, China’s developer ecology and platform, and their commercial plan in the future. He also looked forward to Russian developers and enterprises to work together.
SmartDev 2023 is a starting point for open source China’s internationalization. It shares the history of China’s open source ecology and the future of open source China for developers around the world, and also their plan to compete with GitLab, Atlassian, JFrog and others; at the same time, open source China will also use their local business model to help Russia build its own open source infrastructure Gitlife.ru, to further strengthen the cooperation and collaboration with international audience.
20-year of China’s open source
In the early stage of China’s open source industry, enterprises mainly adopted open source to be more cost effective, and their usage proved the security and reliability of open source technology, so more and more enterprises began to adopting open source product.
In the past five years, the importance of open source in China has increased a lot. The CCP actively promote the usage of open source technology, and the usage open source has gradually become an industry standard.
At the same time, more and more Chinese developers are participating in open source projects around the world, making China the second largest contributor nation to open source around the world.
In terms of commercialization for open source product, there are already a large number of excellent commercial open source companies in China. They provide various alternative software to replace software from outside China(mainly Western) for local enterprises.
Chinese Developer Ecology and Platform
Over the past decade, China has gradually developed a self-sustained open source community. From open source sponsors, open source foundations to open source infrastructure, and finally to developers, every key role was filled by local Chinese institutions and enterprises.
In 2020, China’s first open source foundation, the Open Atomic Open Source Foundation, was established, with Open Source China became its gold sponsor. Under the leadership of the Open Atomic Open Source Foundation, Chinese domestic open source development has been fast forwarded, and open source China and Gitee have gradually become the information center and infrastructure of China’s open source ecology.
After 15 years of development, Open Source China has played an increasingly important role in the development of local open source community.
The commercial future of open source China and Gitee
In the past 15 years, Open Source China has also been exploring its unique commercialization plan and finally achieved something.
Open Source China has gradually established an open source community, a developer tool platform and a R&D management platform for enterprises. In the era of ai, Open Source China will also build its own artificial intelligence platform. Open Source China is planning to build a code generation ai similar to Copilot to help developers write code. In addition, Gitee’s own AI hosting platform (HuggingFace clone) will also be released at the end of the next quarter.
Finally, CEO Xu Yong showed the development plan of Open Source China in the Russian market. He said that he hoped to use the experiences and lessons learned by Open Source China in the past 15 years to work out a plan to build open source platforms, DevOps platforms and even AI with Russian companies. At the same time, open source China will also invest in the Russian market, deliver open source software to Russia, provide solid platform support for China’s open source software to compete abroad, and jointly build an open source future(with Russia).
References
Screenshot in case they deleted it:
