oschina wants to help Putin's Russia
Almost all Chinese companies claim neutrality in Putin’s war, even if they are actively selling weapons to Russia. However, there is an exception. The Chinese GitHub clone, Oschina, has been promoting Putin’s Russian perspective on the war from the start and is announcing its “unlimited relationship” with Russian companies.
I love FOSS, free and open-source software, because it puts the word “free” first. I don’t want it to become an openly available tool for totalitarian regimes to invade other countries. Unlike Ukraine, Putin’s army lacks 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 assist Russia in building their clone of GitHub, Gitlife.ru.
- Oschina will share their open-source software with Russia and 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 titled “Overview of the Open Source Industry in China” in English. Xu Yong shared insights about China’s open-source industry, developer ecosystem, platform, and future commercial plans. He also expressed hopes for collaboration between Russian developers and enterprises.
SmartDev 2023 marks a starting point for Open Source China’s internationalization. It shares the history of China’s open-source ecosystem and the future vision for Open Source China with developers worldwide. It also includes plans to compete with GitLab, Atlassian, JFrog, and others. At the same time, Open Source China will use its local business model to help Russia build its own open-source infrastructure, Gitlife.ru, to further strengthen cooperation and collaboration with international audiences.
20 Years of China’s Open Source
In the early stages of China’s open-source industry, enterprises mainly adopted open source to be more cost-effective. Their usage demonstrated the security and reliability of open-source technology, encouraging more enterprises to adopt open-source products.
In the past five years, the importance of open source in China has grown significantly. The CCP has actively promoted the use of open-source technology, and open source has gradually become an industry standard.
At the same time, more and more Chinese developers are participating in open-source projects worldwide, making China the second-largest contributor to open source globally.
In terms of commercialization of open-source products, a large number of excellent commercial open-source companies have emerged in China. They provide various alternative software solutions to replace software from outside China (primarily Western) for local enterprises.
Chinese Developer Ecosystem and Platform
Over the past decade, China has gradually developed a self-sustained open-source community. From open-source sponsors and foundations to open-source infrastructure and developers, every key role has been 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 as its gold sponsor. Under the leadership of the Open Atomic Open Source Foundation, China’s domestic open-source development has been fast-tracked, and Open Source China and Gitee have gradually become the information center and infrastructure of China’s open-source ecosystem.
After 15 years of development, Open Source China has played an increasingly important role in the growth of the local open-source community.
The Commercial Future of Open Source China and Gitee
Over the past 15 years, Open Source China has also been exploring unique commercialization plans and has finally achieved some success.
Open Source China has gradually established an open-source community, a developer tool platform, and an R&D management platform for enterprises. In the era of AI, Open Source China plans to build its own artificial intelligence platform. This includes developing a code generation AI similar to Copilot to assist developers in writing code. In addition, Gitee’s AI hosting platform (a Hugging Face clone) is set to be released by the end of the next quarter.
Finally, CEO Xu Yong shared the development plan for Open Source China in the Russian market. He stated that he hopes to leverage the experiences and lessons learned by Open Source China over the past 15 years to build open-source platforms, DevOps platforms, and even AI with Russian companies. At the same time, Open Source China plans to 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:
