Technology
China is building an alternative to GitHub called Gitee
China is developing a GitHub alternative named GiteeTechnological decoupling between the U.S. and China has been a blessing to Chinese firms — from mobile and electric vehicle chip makers to software — which are the foundation of millions of company day-to-day operations.
Chinese companies may have developed a firm grip on consumer Internet services, but many of the core technologies underpinning hardware and enterprise software remain in Western companies' hands. As technology firms are increasingly embroiled in wider geopolitical conflicts, their customers and clients feel the heat.
Huawei 's attempt to dismantle imported chips is just one of the many indicators of the insecurity of international tech-dependent Chinese firms.
Another field that makes the tech world nervous is hosting the source code. Chinese developers rely heavily on GitHub, as demonstrated by the government's apparent ban on the platform in 2013, which prompted former Google China chief Kai-Fu Lee to speak out. Today, China's developer community is wary of GitHub's political dispute.
The case is not uncommon. Microsoft-owned GitHub has cut off some services from users in U.S.-sanctioned countries, including Iran , Syria and Crimea, sparking uproar and confusion in the global developer community.
7-year-old Gitee is at the heart of China's drive to locate business source codes. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ( MIIT), one of China's leading tech policy makers, has recently chosen Gitee to build a independent open-source code hosting platform for China.
The project will be managed by a consortium led by Open Source China, a company based in Shenzhen that is named after the open-source community & Gitee. The hosting service appears to be a government-led initiative funded by research universities and the private sector involvement of a consortium of 10 companies, including Huawei, which is itself suffering from supply chain instability in the middle of a political storm.
If China does not have its own open-source network to protect and handle source codes, our domestic tech industry would be very vulnerable to uncontrollable influences, said Huawei Executive Wang Chenglu at an event last August, shortly after GitHub acted to comply with U.S. sanctions legislation.
Gitee claims to have hosted more than 10 million open source projects and offered services to more than 5 million developers so far. For reference, GitHub reported having 100 million repositories and some 31 million developers worldwide last November.
The question is whether the Gitee platform can persuade Chinese developers to move from GitHub — or its Tencent-backed local rival Coding.net — now that industry titans are on board to help. It is also uncertain if GitHub would act to avoid export restrictions, as it indicated when its executive told the Financial Times that it "rose" to open a subsidiary in China.
Gitee is absolutely optimistic that there is room for a "Chinese alternative" to GitHub.
"The universe is meant to be one where a hundred flowers bloom. GitHub and other forms of foundations have a global audience.
In China, there are numerous organizations dedicated to the evangelization of open source software, as well as Gitee, "wrote Open Source China founder, nicknamed" Hongshu "or" Sweet Potato.
The open-source environment can not be developed overnight. It's a method of constructing a sand structure. We believe in the creative potential of Chinese developers. We also believe in our perseverance and power to work for it.
