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Comment by hehehaha | Hacker News Reader

Can someone point me to a significant open source effort spearheaded by China? Is Open Source active and embraced among developers in China?

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Baidu and Alibaba have open source projects (RocketMQ has been donated to Apache by Alibaba http://rocketmq.apache.org)

Chinese developers are the second largest group of contributors on GitHub

there's also a billion and a half of them, most of them don't speak english (edit: not all of the Chinese people are developers of course)

Anyway, GitHub itself it's not OSS and it's owned by Microsoft

AFAIK open source contributions are not usually rewarded in China by employers, but that's true in general in Europe as well

Thanks for that info. I knew about Baidu and Alibaba repos but I was more curious how open source was culturally perceived.

I only know from friends living there, take anything I say as speculations, but what I gather is that they see open source as a technical advantage over starting from scratch, it's not a spontaneous movement.

it makes sense from the point of view of a country that has gained a leading position worldwide from accurately reproducing something that already existed.

judging from the number of Linux distro they are releasing I think they are pretty serious about it.

Exactly. Reimplementing GitHub is not building a rival to GitHub. Like Wikipedia the value isn’t in the platform but the content hosted by the platform. Until there is a critical mass of open source software hosted Chinese GitHub provides very little value.

In the west we had a critical mass of open source software and then built GitHub. This is putting the cart before the horse.

I wrote a blog post a year back https://blog.est.im/201906/stdout-003

vue.js

Isn't vue from a hong konger? Seems not too great if the goal is PRC dominance

vue.js is not sponsored by China, although its founder Evan You is Chinese. He immigrated to the US way before starting vue.js.

Imagine if an American visits China and published an open source project there, then the project magically becomes Chinese?

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