Live data from Hacker News

China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub

restofworld.org

101–110 of 228 posts

Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to be doing pretty well, economically-speaking. I suspect, so long as they can continue to provide good lives for their professional class, the country will continue to grow in world influence. The professionals that drive growth and innovation probably desire to live in a less authoritarian society, but life is generally good enough for them to remain complacent, and turn a blind-eye to injustice.

> They seem to be doing pretty well, economically-speaking. This is all relative. In an absolute sense, China's level of economic development on Bulgaria, Mexico or Kazakstan. They've had a long period of high growth, but that's only because of the abject poverty the Maoists left the country in. Before Deng's reforms, the country was essentially North Korea. China's prosperity is much more of a "most-improved award"…

It's not just most-improved, it's actually the best economic system in large countries (thus more easily corrupt) that were not benefactors of classical imperialism if all you care about is development. This is simply an incontrovertible fact - India, Nigeria, Congo, etc... were in similar initial conditions and fared much worse economically.

Far from being worse than liberal capitalist economies - which are the majority of the world - it's 73 in GDP PPP per capita out of 193 - solidly above average.

It's also not had a period of high growth, it is still having a period of high growth, with 2.4% growth in 2020 which is by far the highest out of all major economies, and a predicted 7.3% next year. This is better than a lot of low income countries, coming from a medium-high income country.

It's also set on escaping the middle income trap in 2-5 years as GDP per capita goes above 12500$, which is something that most liberal capitalist economies cannot achieve.

So no, it's really not just in relative sense. In performance with its current position, it really is doing better than alternate models of liberal capitalism, and by quite a margin.

I don't support the political reality that makes it work at all, but it is clear that liberal capitalism is not the undisputed king anymore.

Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub

#102

They want to block Github entirely because Github allows for the free flow of information (politically sensitive information, not just code) and they don't have a way of doing currently without just blocking all of Github... Which would be bad for business, and China also seems to be entering the software business in a bigger way. Actually, if you want to send large amounts of text information to users in China right…

> China also seems to be entering the software business in a bigger way. All of our jobs and companies are at risk. China has far more software engineers than we do, all willing to work 996. They'll steal our tech and our data until they're ahead, then shut us off. We already lost our manufacturing industry. Our tech, entertainment, knowledge, and capital are next. China has bought our biggest gaming and media compan…

They are hardly willing to work 996. Extreme opposition is mounting, and a lot - maybe most - of the younger generation of programmers soft-strike by not doing anything work related at all after 4-5pm. Because of relatively generous firing protection and a lack of programmers they generally get away with it too.

This is actually a big reason why most Chinese people didn't care about the CCP going after Jack Ma, 996 is extremely unpopular.

That said, given the shortage of programmers, being willing to work unreasonable and frankly unproductive hours is not a sufficient deterrent to competitiveness.

Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub

#103
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the CCP cares about an obscure American social network. They know they have a dependency on American software & software distribution mechanisms, & have known far longer than Parler has been around.

The obscure American social network is not the interesting bit of information. It's that the infrastructure and delivery corporations decided overnight not to support a customer for not aligning with their values.

This is why China used the GFW to grow Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, WeChat and more that provide more than sufficient infrastructure and delivery, from servers to payment processors, and currently has almost-good-enough alternatives for the silicon down to the foundry level.

Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long before this strategy backfires? When does the CCP hurt itself because it stifled innovation? When does it have political problems because it suppressed the wrong thing? I can't tell if this style of governing is super robust or a house of cards.

Probably very long. Given the success of the Chinese ecosystem compared to other regions on the globe, including a lot of democratic countries without significant limits on expression, it doesn't seem to be very important. The first answer is that innovation can be channelled towards military or surveillance technology instead. The government has no problem with research into facial recognition, enterprise software,…

If China's system is really "open source" then this is really dumb. Basically, they give out any innovations they create, while shielding themselves from any external innovation.

I don't see how this could possible benefit them over any measurable amount of time. Sure, they can do private repos for sensitive stuff, but the benefit of an open system like github is not in the closed off stuff... it is in the openness and propensity to inspire collaboration. Without the openness, they will only fall behind from the second they enable their one way information shield.

Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub

#106
post #80

Thing is that in the big picture, it's not just that China is building a replacement for GitHub. China is building a replacement for everything that matters and accelerates their transition to be the Super Power. And they have been doing so for last 30 years, just that now it's hitting a critical mass and world is waking up to it. And I think, we, The West, have been getting it wrong. We are looking at China like a j…

the last time the west only managed to "win" the moon race because it was competing against financially poor and poorly managed soviet state(all key brains behind soviet space program were released from gulag just to work on it and knew that if they will not please their masters they will go back to gulag and die. the greatest motivation of all time)

china now is a lot more sane people that don't mess with politics/publicity enjoy comparable levels of freedoms to the west(In a lot of cases more economic freedom but in all cases no political freedoms) which makes them much more likely to succeed competing against corrupt west as it is now

Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub

#108
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They seem to be doing pretty well, economically-speaking. This is all relative. In an absolute sense, China's level of economic development on Bulgaria, Mexico or Kazakstan. They've had a long period of high growth, but that's only because of the abject poverty the Maoists left the country in. Before Deng's reforms, the country was essentially North Korea. China's prosperity is much more of a "most-improved award"…

> There's no reason to believe that Xi Jinping thought can produce an economy that in any way is competitive with liberal capitalist democracy. Isn't it already? Speaking broadly of economic trends for the past 30 years, China has dominated manufacturing, at levels of increasing sophistication. To the extent it's running into issues, it's been a victim of its own success: laborers in China are increasingly too expens…

> Speaking broadly of economic trends for the past 30 years, China has dominated manufacturing, at levels of increasing sophistication. To the extent it's running into issues, it's been a victim of its own success: laborers in China are increasingly too expensive for China to be a cost effective exporter at the low end.

That’s just it. It’s grown because it had massive amounts of cheap labour but now it doesn’t. Can they transition into a competitive economy up the food chain?

Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long before this strategy backfires? When does the CCP hurt itself because it stifled innovation? When does it have political problems because it suppressed the wrong thing? I can't tell if this style of governing is super robust or a house of cards.

Hard to say because they seem to be letting others do the innovating and then they just copy what works.

I saw this yesterday.

https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1351114653263409156

Doesn't look good for the US.

Post reply on HN