Avoid sanctions and enter the Chinese market! GitHub plans to open a branch in China

Domestic GitHub often has trouble opening. The news of GitHub coming to China is full of worries and joys!

GitHub Chief Operating Officer Erica Brescia revealed in a recent interview with FT that it is considering establishing a Chinese branch and has received potential support.

Relevant plans are currently in the early stages and have not yet been announced.

The company has met with relevant Chinese departments and received a supportive attitude.

As soon as this news came out, it was immediately welcomed by the majority of developers, especially Chinese developers, but it did not completely relieve their worries.

Encouraged by Beijing officials to open a foreign subsidiary first

Sheng Wu, a developer from Beijing, participated in one of the events. He told " The Economist, GitHub discussed the possibility of publicly expanding its China operations at the event.

An anonymous GitHub employee said that GitHub Enterprise, GitHub’s profitable product for large companies, recently passed the “GB18030” Chinese national standard certification, which is a prerequisite for providing services in China.

Erica Brescia said in an interview with the Financial Times that Beijing has a "very encouraging attitude" towards the company's expansion plans in China.

Brescia said on the sidelines of the first event in Beijing

(zf ministries and commissions) told us that they believe that open source is a way to further innovate based on the innovations of others. Not a bad approach, but...it brings more security because it's not subject to any trade restrictions from the United States.

GitHub plans to open a "wholly foreign-owned subsidiary in China, starting with the general manager," before exploring "joint ventures and the possibility of hosting GitHub content in China," Brescia said.

How will GitHub enter China?

In fact, GitHub’s move to enter China has already been foreshadowed. Erica Brescia has visited China several times this year. In mid-September, Erica Brescia personally hosted GitHub's first event in China. In December, Erica Brescia also held meet-and-greet events with developers in Shenzhen and Beijing.

Source Erica Brescia Twitter screenshot

Although GitHub’s entry into China is still in its infancy, before that, there have been relevant predictions that GitHub will How to enter China.

One of the speculations is that GitHub may establish a new subsidiary in China under the jurisdiction of the Chinese government and set up servers in mainland China. However, this may raise jurisdictional issues regarding computer code databases between China and the United States.

Another speculation refers to placing the server in non-inland areas of China, but close to China, such as Singapore, Hong Kong and other places. This can solve the problem of slow server response speed.

In the interview, Erica Brescia also revealed how GitHub entered China. She noted that GitHub plans to consider setting up a wholly foreign-owned subsidiary in China and hiring staff starting at the general manager level before exploring "joint ventures and the possibility of hosting GitHub content in China."

In addition, Erica Brescia also added that GitHub has met with officials from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China. She believes China has been making a strategic push around open source in general because it provides a way to connect with the rest of the software development world without relying on proprietary technology.

China has become Github’s second market

At present, it seems that there are two important reasons for Github to enter China.

The first is the restrictions imposed by the US government. China wants to protect its channels for obtaining technology from being affected.

Secondly, GitHub itself does not want to lose the huge potential of the Chinese market.

GitHub’s 2019 Octoverse report shows that in terms of the number of developers, China has become the second most important market for GitHub after the United States, and it is growing rapidly. In 2019, the rate of Chinese developers forking and cloning open source on GitHub increased by 48%

GitHub subsidiary plan to prevent problems but not cure the root cause?

In the situation on both sides of the Pacific, code hosting platforms that were originally on the fringes have also become political tools.

As the world's largest open source code hosting platform, GitHub and GitLab first restricted the accounts of developers in countries such as Iran, and later issued bans indicating that some positions were no longer open to recruitment in regions such as China and Russia.

Many people have been worried that if GitHub continues like this, one day it will either cut off the service or may not be able to access it normally.

So GitHub’s official action can be regarded as a preliminary solution.

However, this is not a perfect solution, because as long as GitHub is still a company registered in the United States, there is still the possibility of "cutting off" due to compliance with regulations.

Compared with the RISC-V open source organization moving to Switzerland, the establishment of a "factory" by GitHub in China is not a permanent solution.

Moreover, GitHub's two previous important "helpless actions" have also raised concerns about its ability to maneuver vertically and horizontally in the overall situation.

Once forced to become a means of sanctions

In July this year, GitHub was used by the United States as a means of sanctions against Iran and Crimea in the "strike". Accounts in areas sanctioned by the United States are restricted without warning, and personal pages receive a 404 directly.

Regarding the specific restrictions on his account, the programmer listed them one by one:

First, it is hosted on My personal website on GitHub Pages got 404.

Secondly, private repo cannot be created.

Third, the private repo created in the past is now disabled. The git clone command returns 403.

Fourthly, public repo can be created, but cannot be deleted.

At that time, GitHub suddenly cut off the supply of accounts in Iran, Crimea and other places without warning.

Even many Iranian developers living in the Netherlands have also been affected.

CEO Nat Friedman explained that this was to comply with US sanctions and had to impose restrictions on accounts in Iran, Syria and Crimea.

But even so, GitHub shocked many developers.

Because it happened suddenly without any reminder or buffer.

Many innocent developers can no longer use it normally overnight, and their work and development process can be described as a sudden disaster.

GitHub may not have done anything wrong, but it did not consider human feelings for legal reasons, which hurt the hearts of many developer fans.

Later in November, another platform GitLab announced the launch of a "job family country block" for team members with access to customer data, involving China and Russia , local employees are no longer able to apply for this type of position.

So another stone stirred up waves. GitHub may not have expected that an open source code platform would now become a pawn and focus in the political game.

What is the significance of GitHub coming to China?

Today, when digital technology spreads across all fields, open source is indispensable to the development of Chinese science and technology.

360 Chairman Zhou Hongyi once mentioned that without open source software, China's Internet may not develop at such a rapid pace; without open source Android system, China's mobile phone industry may not sweep the world; without open source code, China's The AI ​​industry may not be so booming.

Not only that, he also believes that open source is not only a software development method, but actually a form of economic development and an innovation mechanism. It can be seen that open source is important to China.

And GitHub is the world's largest open source community. The significance of GitHub to developers is self-evident, which can be reflected in the words of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Satya Nadella once said that digital technology has now pervaded the entire social and economic fields. Software developers are the architects of digital technology, and GitHub is the "home of developers."

It is worth mentioning that Zhou Hongyi also ridiculed GitHub’s impact on China. He said:

There is a joke in the industry that one day GitHub goes bankrupt and China’s AI It will be set back five years. Why? Because many of the AI ​​computing frameworks we use are developed based on international open source codes.

Now, this “developer’s home” plans to enter China. For Chinese developers, why not?

#Where is the domestic open source platform today?

The successive “stains” on GitHub have also prompted domestic developers to call out whether they should switch to domestic open source platforms?

But so far, there seems to be no domestic open source code platform that can compete with GitHub or GitLab.

In fact, similar platforms, BAT giants and startups are involved.

A subsidiary of Alibaba: Alibaba Cloud Code.

Produced by Tencent: Tencent Cloud Developer Platform.

Baidu has: Baidu Efficiency Cloud.

Huawei simultaneously launched its own open source platform - Huawei Open Source Code Hosting Platform when the Ark compiler was open sourced.

In terms of startup companies, MaYun (nothing to do with Jack Ma), MaShi, etc. are also famous in small circles, but there is still a lot of work to be done before they can reach the influence of large platforms.

Domestic code open source platforms are not available, but they are comparable to GitHub and even serve as a "spare tire". Currently, they can only spread their hands.

What do you think?

This article refers to the WeChat public accounts "Qubit" and "Leifeng.com"

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