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The rise and rise of open source in China
China’s embrace of open source software has evolved into a powerful force in the global technology landscape, driving innovations in cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other areas
As the world marvelled at China’s rapid economic transformation at the start of the 21st century, a quiet revolution was brewing in the country’s technology sector.
Driven by a strategic vision to reduce reliance on foreign software and empower a new generation of software developers, the Chinese government embarked on a bold initiative to embrace the power of open source software.
In 1999, the unveiling of Red Flag Linux, China’s homegrown open source operating system, marked the country’s intent to chart its own course in the digital age, leveraging the collaborative spirit of open source to drive innovation.
Over the next two decades, China’s open source movement gained momentum, fuelled by government investments and a growing pool of talented developers. The country’s universities became hubs of open source education, introducing students to open source software development and encouraging them to contribute to projects that would shape the future.
Today, China’s open source community has become a driving force behind some of the most influential projects in the cloud-native ecosystem. These include KubeEdge, which enables Kubernetes to be used in edge computing; Habor, a cloud-native registry for Kubernetes; and Dragonfly, a file distribution and image acceleration system.
Chris Aniszczyk, chief technology officer of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), noted that most open source projects spearheaded in China came from companies seeking to build trust and expand globally by contributing their work to the CNCF.
“PingCap, for example, open sourced the TiDB database and contributed it to the CNCF to try to get customers elsewhere,” Aniszczyk told Computer Weekly on the sidelines of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit in Hong Kong.
Shaping governance
Besides contributing code, the Chinese open source community is also shaping the direction and governance of open source tools. For instance, Kevin Wang, lead of Huawei’s cloud-native open source team, serves on the CNCF’s technical oversight committee, while Miley Fu of Second State is a CNCF ambassador and founding member of open source runtime WasmEdge.
“China has the second-largest number of developers on GitHub by country,” said Stormy Peters, vice-president for communities at GitHub. “These are individuals who have an account on GitHub with public repositories.”
Businesses in China are also supporting open source software, with Chinese companies well represented at open source foundations such as the Linux Foundation, the CNCF and the Apache Foundation.
“If we look at their memberships and who is helping to support them, you can see that Chinese companies account for over 10% of the sponsorships in all of those foundations,” said Peters. “That means there’s a lot of support at the business level for the activities of individual contributors.”
The true testament to China’s open source prowess came during the Covid-19 pandemic. When the crisis hit, Hong Kong’s developers sprang into action, creating an open source contact-tracing system that leveraged smartphone technology to help contain the spread of the virus.
“People were afraid of being tracked, but because it was open source, you could see how it was tracking you, what it was sharing and who the data was shared with,” said Peters. “I thought that was a very good use of open source software that came out of this area.”
Read more about AI and open-source in APAC
- IBM will work with AI Singapore on technical exchanges to enhance Sea-Lion and make the region’s first LLM available to data scientists and engineers through its AI use case library.
- Red Hat is expanding its reach into smaller firms as well as the automotive and other industries to fuel its ‘high-double digit’ growth in the region.
- Data61’s open-source seL4 microkernel project will be supported by a new foundation created under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.
- Agoda CTO Idan Zalzberg explains why the online travel agency with a massive technology footprint prefers to run things in-house with open-source software and not rely too much on public cloud services.
In the private sector, Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker Nio is using open source software, including containers, Kubernetes and KubeEdge, to improve the development and quality of its EV software, which can adapt to spotty network latency and connectivity.
Today, China also is the second-largest contributing country to the CNCF, accounting for over 20% of the foundation’s projects. Aniszczyk said the massive scale of open source deployments in China, such as those involving EVs, has led to feature requests and modifications that flow back to open source projects.
In the realm of AI, Chinese firms such as Alibaba Cloud have open sourced their large language models, while others are riding on the “Llama effect” to fine-tune Meta’s Llama models for specific applications, according to Matt White, executive director of PyTorch Foundation and general manager of artificial intelligence at the Linux Foundation.
“There’s a lot of activity with Chinese data and fine-tuning Llama on Chinese language tasks,” said White. “The Chinese offshoots of Llama have been able to transfer-learn and perform extremely well with applications we’ve seen in the wild.”
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