Can someone point me to a significant open source effort spearheaded by China? Is Open Source active and embraced among developers in China?
I wrote a blog post a year back https://blog.est.im/201906/stdout-003
China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub
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Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub
#142Earlier 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"…
> economy that in any way is competitive with liberal capitalist democracy.
Fixation on only economy and relative development indexes distract from the measure that matter: comprehensive national power or other similar composite measures. Apart from 1st rate turbojets engines and semiconductors, China has indigenous capability for nearly every sector. Compared to US, no other country is remotely competitive in a comprehensive sense. Relative measures only disguises how far China has come in terms of national capabilities, very few countries have: indigenous nuke, space, military, light/heavy industries, tech, media etc. When US policy makers reference peer competition, it's not referring to other OECD countries, it's referring to China because no one else has similar levels of comprehensive hard/soft power to remotely matter.
"Most improved" hides the fact that China holds the silver medal after brief development period, or that the gap between gold and silver are closer than gap between bronze and no-name junior varsity bench player. In that sense, the Chinese system (tuned to specific Chinese conditions) has already out competed nearly everyone else when considering aggregate factors to general power which enables prosperity. The question is whether Xi thought can make China competitive enough with US to create multipolar world. Seeing as to how everyone is hedging against Sino/US coldwar, right now it's seems to be between strong maybe and probably. Ultimately, Chinese scales means never reaching per capita parity can still outcompete in general. Doing so as middle income country with massive income disparity and relative easier gains only works in Xi's favour.
Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub
#143Earlier 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,…
Discussions about the first amendment often elide its true purpose, keeping the government honest. One way that a lack of free speech can hurt a country is that smarter individuals are more likely to get arrested due to their greater innate capability to come up with novel-to-them ideas, some of which are "booby trapped" and get their originators arrested. However, the consequences of it being illegal to make practical attempts at changing the government truly come home to roost when officials realize that they can steal. The less ability citizens have to exchange information that threatens the authority of the regime, the less able they are to not be stolen from. The problem with that is, private economic activity needs resources, and officials tend to take all they can get. Again and again, in the history of countries around the world, the activity of many individuals given relatively small domains of authority has lead to the destruction of the nation's industrial capacity. Since it is impossible to question the bribe-taking of the inspector without questioning the legitimacy of the system who installed him, criminals within government quickly discover that they can do anything they want, so long as they keep their superiors happy, which is typically accomplished by making sure they get a cut of the proceeds.
Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
vue.js
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?
Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are using numbers that are 6 years out of date for a country that has had 6% YoY growth.
The Chinese numbers are from 2019. The American numbers are from 2015. If anything the comparison strongly disadvantages the US, since there was robust growth in the latter half of the decade.
Can you use a single source that contains the numbers for both China and the US, please? For such data points that have a lot of very different possible methodologies it's quite important to use the same source or ensure that the methodology is exactly the same.
Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 majo…
CCP China is thriving because of liberal capitalism -- the flood of hard currency that otherwise was unobtainable made all the difference. CCP China should build monuments to President Bush (#41) and President Clinton. Otherwise they would have went the way of the USSR. edit: and President Bush (#43) for making most-favored-nation trading status with CCP China permanent.
This does not bear out in the data - of 60+% employment in the public sector as well as higher performance than (much more) liberal capitalist countries.
Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub
#147Sometimes, people write as if the authorities in China really believe they can e.g. cease to teach people how to read and write, and speak a common tongue. I know nobody here is quite that stupid, (although it bears mentioning the more theocratically regressive nation states we have around the world do actually do this, to women) -So this is at some level only a rhetorical complaint. People need to understand that th…
> The chinese fear of information and passing information Chinese does not fear information, it only fears "unauthorized" information flow.
Contextually yes, that's what I meant.
Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub
#148wow. they even copied the contribution map. Is it also cloning github repos and hosting on gitee? Why does US gov put up with this crazy wholesale censorship and copying?
Code on github is open source, so copying is supposed to and expected to occur. The copyrights of the various projects on github are held by their respective authors, not by the US government. These authors have chosen to permit and encourage copying of their code.
Many of these authors are not even American citizens or residents.
Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub
#149They 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…
Is this a mirror/proxy of Github. IP address registered to company in Singapore. Domain registration has mainland China physical address:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25842028
Re: China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub
#150We're all going to have to learn how to read comments in technical Mandarin with machine translation.
it would be interesting to see how the phrase “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” looks when cycled through multiple translations and then back again into english.