KubeCon China - how China is more open and collaborative than many believe

China is the world’s second largest contributor to open-source software projects. As Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, put it last week in Hong Kong, the former British territory which is now a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China:

We have a lot of great contributions from China across our whole community. If you look at the straight-up raw data of contributions, China is the number two contributing country across all our projects. Indeed, some projects are born in China.

The scale of China’s contributions to software development are certainly impressive: there are thought to be seven million developers in the country as a whole – which is roughly equivalent to the population of Hong Kong – and 1.2 million of them are on GitHub. Indeed, that seven million total makes China the world’s largest software developer overall.

Stormy Peters is VP of Communities for social coding platform GitHub. Speaking at the combined KubeCon China, CloudNativeCon, Open Source Summit, and AI_dev event last week, she explained how the host city, Hong Kong, is key to that frenetic activity:

Hong Kong is the fastest-growing community – it’s growing by 50% year on year. This means for every two maintainers here in the room, for every two people that are here with an open-source account on GitHub, there will be one more sitting in the seat next to you next year. 

That is phenomenal growth, but it is not just at an individual level. If we look at the enterprises in China that are supporting open-source software, and at the foundations that support open-source software, like the Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and at their memberships, you can see that Chinese companies are well represented. They make up over 10% of the platinum sponsorships in all of these foundations.

Open source brings opportunity

So, not only is China – often portrayed as closed and hostile to Western interests – the world’s second-largest open-source player (and its second largest economy, of course), the likes of Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei are some of the biggest backers of collaborative, non-proprietary technology.

But that is not to say that China does not provide its own alternatives, she noted:

Gitee is also super-popular in China. I don't think this means there's twice as many developers, but I do think it means that there's twice as much open-source software out there. There's twice as many repos, so I think it's probably the same developers on both platforms.

A bold statement, but not entirely accurate: Gitee claims to have five million users and ten million repositories (repos) overall, which, if true, makes it the largest open-source player within China itself.

That aside, Peters continued:

In 1999, China was already releasing its own Linux distribution. Then it went on to make a wise decision to bring open-source software into industry. They started investing in open-source software in their universities, and eventually China went on to create its own open-source software and courseware. 

The reason I think this was such a wise decision is because when you educate students, when you teach them how to collaborate and work together, they really learn that. They learn that way of working, and they take it on into their jobs. They take it into their industries, and they teach the rest of the world. So, teaching students in these ways and involving them is critical.

This approach has also helped China emerge as a dominant player in artificial intelligence, she said:

In about 2015, we started to see some of the first open-source AI projects coming out of China. And right after that, we started to see the government take a big interest in making sure that open-source software is successful, putting out guidelines for using it. We saw a lot of consortiums and enterprises coming together to work on it.

But then 2020 happened. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the world’s workers back into their homes, and behind masks and locked doors. We are still living in the long tail of that crisis, but open-source was – unsurprisingly – both a beneficiary of it and a partial solution to the planet’s problems.

Peters explained:

One of the things that came out of this region, and out of Hong Kong in particular, was a lot of open-source software that was designed to understand and manage the pandemic. 

For example, Hong Kong had a piece of open-source software that was used to track cellphones and figure out if you had been exposed to COVID, and notify you. I thought that was very powerful, because people were so afraid of being trapped. And because it was open source, you could see how it was tracking, what it was sharing, and who data was shared with. 

It was then that we started to see China take the second lead in the world for the number of open-source software developers, all the way to today. 

And the same continues to be true in the generative AI space. Hong Kong and China are both in the top list of the number of open-source generative repos on GitHub. And the more GitHub commits a country has, the more venture capital is applied, and the more venture companies emerge. 

In short, the more open-source software activity that is happening in a country, the more business there is. And we certainly see that in China.

Miley Fu is Developer Advocate for Chinese AI inference at the Edge provider, Second State. She told delegates:

I was trained as a simultaneous interpreter. But as you can see from this conference, we don't have a human interpreter [sadly, as the real-time AI translation was as fleeting and unreliable as simultaneous captioning in TV news programs]. 

As people say, ‘If you can't beat them, join them’, and this is a job that is almost entirely being replaced by AI. But thanks to the chance of me working on a banking software project, I got drawn to technology. And I'm super attracted to the idea of open source because people get to collaborate.

Open source is also the reason that there are more women and girls working in Chinese software development today, she said: the community has been far more welcoming than the proprietary world, it seems.

Kevin Wang is Lead of the Cloud-Native Open-Source team at Shenzhen-based Chinese conglomerate, Huawei. In an unusual claim, he told us:

Myself, I work for Huawei. But actually, I'm more of a community guy!

I have been in the [open-source and cloud-native] community for 10 years, since the beginning of the CNCF. And the CNCF has a very special structure: the governing board focuses more on the strategic part, while the end-user community, including the end-user Technical Advisory Board, is more focused on real-world usage, and on experience and knowledge sharing among end-users.

And in the middle is the Technical Oversight Committee [of which Wang is a member]. This mainly focuses on the technical vision, and the technical trends of the CNCF. We manage projects’ lifecycles, including reaching out to new projects, giving them the recommendation [sic], the maturity level, and how they can grow. We evaluate project maturity, including the technical part, and the community part, and open governance. And also, the end-user adoption part.

He concluded:

So, you can see, it is an important thing that we have members from China on the Technical Oversight Committee! […] I want to highlight that when a project reaches an incubation level or graduation level, the TOC will evaluate it, including the technical parts, the community part, and the adoption part, to make sure it's a mature project that end-users can trust to adopt.

China, then, is central to all of these processes.

My take

My week in Hong Kong proved to be fascinating and insightful: I found a community that is young, excited, enthusiastic, and far more open and collaborative outside of China than Western commentators would have us believe. 

That said, it took a handful of Uber journeys around the city and its islands to reveal a deeper truth.

Uber is illegal in Hong Kong, and yet flourishes, with more than 30,000 drivers – from every age group – drawn to the freedom it offers to roam the city, earn money, and start new conversations. As one driver told me, even the local police love Uber, because they hate the city’s notoriously difficult taxi drivers. 

But while Uber, a Western company, is hiding in plain sight, it is popular with the Cantonese locals for one simple reason: the chance to escape what some Hong Kong citizens see, privately, as a repressive government in Beijing. Many talk about it openly, albeit in hushed tones and fast-moving electric vehicles.

In many ways, the open-source and cloud-native community plays to that same desire: it benefits China, but above all it benefits its members by offering them the potential to collaborate on a global stage.