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Comment by bpfrh | Hacker News Reader

I don't see that much opensource coming from china.

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.

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I think many companies in China have a different relationship with IP. They realize that people copy from each other, they will gladly copy from others and expect them to do the same, yet they realize that being hard-to-copy gives them a competitive advantage.

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.

> I don't see that much opensource coming from china.

What you don't look for you don't see. I see a huge contribution in OSS from contributors based in China.

I suspect that Rockchip has better documentation in Chinese, which may be not easy to locate if you're not fluent in Chinese and are not inside 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?

[1]:https://github.com/radxa/rockchip-bsp

Huggingface rings a bell? 80% is coming from chinese reaearch.

Indeed, the Chinese often violate open source licenses and outright steal proprietary code from non-Chinese companies.

Loongson did pretty well in getting Loongarch64 upstreamed in all kinds of open source projects

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