It important to be aware of the significant progress that China is making in AI, robotics, and processors, and admirable that they are open sourcing so much of it.
It’s great work and an inspiration
It’s great work and an inspiration
The purpose of RISC-V was to have a boring, unencumbered ISA that everyone could freely implement. It was a patent play, not a technical advancement.
This doesn't mean that the openness extends easily to those outside China, its culture, and especially its language though.
For example the popular arm rockchip offerings are so bad at contributing to mainline linux or even sharing documentation that the single person supporting them dropped it due to lack of fund and being unable to get any contact to share documentation.
IMHO, chinese opensource does at best the same thing many western companies do:
Opensource the things that are not you secret sauce/income, or things which would benefit you if people adopt them.
With the added caveat that china in generally is notorious for not abiding by patent laws and copying.
In the west, being hard-to-copy often just means slapping a proprietary license on your software and not worrying about much else. THe "source available" model is a prime example, the software is trivial to copy in theory, but everybody knows there would be legal consequences, so nobody serious actually does it.
In China, this doesn't work, so you have to obfuscate your code, build anti-reverse-engineering protections etc. This is similar to how the gaming market works in the west.
There are plenty of great writeups on reverse-engineering Chinese apps and hardware, and their reverse-engineering protections are often far more elaborate than what those same apps would have if made by western companies.
What you don't look for you don't see. I see a huge contribution in OSS from contributors based in China.
Upstreaming the kernel support has never been a breeze for any ARM designs, IIRC. But the custom kernels are GPL [1], aren't they?
all successful cultures are, they're just divided on whether they admit it or not. Germany was late to industrialization and a lot of our businesses went to Britain under the pretense of doing business and copied chemical plant factory layouts one-to-one, but we like the "we're the country of engineers and thinkers" story much better than "we were a bit slow and ripped the British and French off".
The Chinese just don't pretend. I've spent a lot of time in China and around FB's attempted Snapchat acquisition in tech circles there used to be the joke that FB is the most Chinese American company because of Zuckerberg's relentless copying. The valley works the exact same way, they're just more likely to pretend everything is the result of some boy genius making it up.