I would think the outrageous antics with the Chinese governmnt directly attacking Github and using attacks with extremely wide reaching effects (using Baidu analytics links as a javascript injection attack) would uh... be more likely to damage access to Github.
But ignoring that, it seems to me like increasingly we're wanting distributed (dare I even say: federated) code forges even outside of China as people realize quite how overly and dangerously centralized their infrastructure and company are over Github.
No love (or hate) for China or the US; but from a European perspective it does shock me how much we rely on the USA.
As a bit of a tangent, we recently learned that we couldn't provide service to people living in Crimea, because google cloud block them, because google cloud is beholden to US regulators.
Now, the EU doesn't have any sanctions on Crimea itself (because that would legitimise the annexation), but they have sanctions against Russia instead.
So, we're defacto instituting the will of the US by choosing a US operator- and I think this is true of basically everything we use today. I can't think of a single tech company outside of Spotify that is not owned by the US which is popular in Europe.
Not only do we not "own our data" our digital economy is entirely dependent on the US not being malicious.
China’s doing it too. They bought ARM shortly after Brexit.
I don’t doubt that there is a migratory factor, though I don’t believe it’s primarily due to salary or other compensation as I assume you’re inferring- a cornucopia of tech giants is going to attract talent from the world over.
So a consequence of centralisation is more centralisation.
I thought SoftBank is Japanese, not Chinese? SoftBank bought ARM, not a Chinese company, otherwise it would be a bit weird for ARM (assuming they're Chinese now) to cut ties with Huewai.
Is anyone here a dev working in China? Would love to know a bit about what dev culture is like in China, for instance:
What are dev practises like - do people do Agile / Scrum? Is "post-agile" (sorry) scepticism a thing? What about TDD and CI/CD?
How about technologies, do people develop on Linux, are they using git, are american libraries/frameworks big - are people using React etc?
How about things like FP and niche languages - is there much appetite for people experimenting with new tech/languages or are Python/Java the defacto choices for application work and everything else shunned?
Is there a Chinese-equivalent to GitHub - is engineering in China big enough that they can have their own independent OSS culture? (Is companies contributing back to OSS a thing?)
EDIT: to add one last question - are developers seen as feature-factories or is the relationship between product and developers/tech more flat/harmonious than that?
I work for Huawei (Audience gasps)... but outside China. I can answer some of your questions based on what I've seen.
> What are dev practises like - do people do Agile / Scrum?
Yes. At least what passes for Agile in enterprises.
> do people develop on Linux
Yes. Huawei even maintains its own distro called Euler OS.
> are they using git
Yes. SourceSafe, ClearCase and SVN were used by different teams in the past but have now mostly converged on git.
> are american libraries/frameworks big - are people using React etc?
Yes. Although given the nature of the business, teams that can use a shiny new application framework are a bit of a niche.
> How about things like FP and niche languages
Would you consider TTCN-3 to be a sufficiently niche language?
> is there much appetite for people experimenting with new tech/languages
Containerization and micro-services took hold quite quickly.
> are Python/Java the defacto choices
C is probably the most widely used language but then again it's down to the nature of the business. Java and Python are used a fair bit and Go usage is growing fast.
> Is companies contributing back to OSS a thing?
Definitely. Huawei is regularly one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel each cycle. Hadoop, Postgres, OpenStack, ONOS etc. see a bit of participation. There are also projects like Apache CarbonData and OpenSDS that are primarily driven by Huawei employees.
Why is Huawei dragging their feet on doing basic library updates on their LTE basestation firmware?
HCSEC asked your company to update to modern OpenSSL a year ago and implement reproducible builds. Neither issue has been handled, and these LTE basestations are extremely vulnerable due to the inaction of your employer.
Combined with the poor engineering of your employer's Windows drivers, it is reasonable to cease use of Huawei developed software. Security is obviously not a priority, leaving users of Huawei software vulnerable to any person who can be bothered to look up a few CVEs and run Metasploit against your companies products.
TBH I don't think its has affected morale inside the company, especially at the lower levels. Nobody knows what the top management is thinking and it's just business as usual for us grunts. I haven't heard anyone voice a pessimistic view of the future. The reaction has basically been "Meh". But then again, this is outside China and in business units that aren't really affected by the trade war drama.
Chinese dev here, currently at xiaomi, worked for VMware and Baidu
> What are dev practises like - do people do Agile / Scrum?
Not full/standard practice I think, normally just standup meeting I guess.., when I was in VMware China, some projects used scrum.
> Is "post-agile" (sorry) scepticism a thing?
No
> What about TDD and CI/CD?
I'd say TDD and CI are common.
> How about technologies, do people develop on Linux, are they using git,
Yes, all the time.
> are american libraries/frameworks big - are people using React etc?
Yes
> How about things like FP and niche languages - is there much appetite for people experimenting with new tech/languages or are Python/Java the defacto choices for application work and everything else shunned?
Yes, go/rust is gaining popularity.
> Is there a Chinese-equivalent to GitHub - is engineering in China big enough that they can have their own independent OSS culture? (Is companies contributing back to OSS a thing?)
No, there are some github like services, e.g. gitee.com, but the scale and user base is not at same scale.
> are developers seen as feature-factories or is the relationship between product and developers/tech more flat/harmonious than that?
There are lots of jokes about product&developer here in China, so you can imagine.
To answer your last question, there not a significant Chinese-equivalent to GitHub yet, partly because GitHub is still largely accessible in China. A lot of Chinese tech giants have been active on GitHub and have plenty of repos:
'Fake Agile' is a term. But I think this is global.
It is hard to find Linux/Unix people. Those that develop the skillset are hot property for the BATs. Universities universally use Windows as a platform (students bring their own laptop) with exception for '985' classed colleges who are the elite institutions. But experience and certification is always needed for a new job. There is little positive-feedback for self learning.
Java is predominant, C# number 2. There is not a lot of appetite for experimenting as company culture is largely, though not always, hours-based. Python is very thin. Front-end is quite easy.
Have a try yourself: Go to 51job.com and do a search for skills. You can see a ton of Java (5:1 vs C# and 20:1 for Go) and not a lot of anything else.
There is no equivalent to Github. Github was 'blocked' two years ago for a few days and then unblocked because development teams ceased to function, BAT, government, international.
There is a sharing culture but little understanding of licensing.
Your edit: It really depends on the company culture.
Chinese devs I know are pretty versed with the rest of the world's developer community. Probably because they have to, it is way to get knowledge and acknowledgement.
One thing that is distinctly and decisively different though, is the cloud provider. AWS/Azure are operating under constraint there. While Alibaba Cloud is close copy of AWS, it is not quite the same thing, and indeed is developing into its own ecosystem focus on wholesale solution other than being the build block of internet.
With ongoing trade war and Huawei's sanctions, expecting Chinese government put raising domestic technology industry that mirrors to US technology at its highest priority.
The feeling I've gotten is that there are internal communities in China, Russia and possibly Japan. Then there is the rest that clumps together in English. I'd love to get some confirmation of this though, as it is just my hunch.
Yeah so this is my hunch too (which I want to prove/disprove)
When you think about it, there is almost a unidirectional knowledge transfer: plenty of Chinese people will study and work abroad and then go back to China. By comparison, how many people do you know of who do the reverse - in terms of ratios, how do these numbers compare? Open source code and academic research is all out there in English for people to read and absorb, but China also has the scale and funding to then internally propel these ideas and then publish in Chinese (if at all).
Though it sounds like there is some degree of open source and that Github is mostly the defacto in China too.
> Though it sounds like there is some degree of open source and that Github is mostly the defacto in China too.
It's not just some degree, afaik Chinese companies have been really embracing open source [0]. Some argue this is the result of the Chinese cultural perspective that ideas are not owned by anyone, which open-source perfectly aligns with. [1]
I don't know about Russia or Japan. For China, there are clusters around key universities and their satellites, and spin-offs from those satellites either directly/partially owned or from alumni.
But it's haphazard. Most universities are incapable or unwilling of even running an email service and all emails go through QQ. That's not 'QQ for Domains' but just personal QQ numbers.
I'll bite. Please note that I've worked for Alibaba and a startup (Video++) but both in research capacities so our practices will differ from the norm.
> What are dev practises like - do people do Agile / Scrum? Is "post-agile" (sorry) scepticism a thing? What about TDD and CI/CD?
A watered down fork of Agile is really common. At both companies, I've experienced poor management. No one ever asked if I had blockers, needed more resources, etc. It was just expected there would be delays and we build them into the development schedule. This can lead to weeks of getting nowhere because no one is there to help you.
> How about technologies, do people develop on Linux, are they using git, are american libraries/frameworks big - are people using React etc?
In my experience, regardless of verbal ability developers can read and write English purely because they need to do so to succeed in their jobs. There are some sites similar to github/stackoverflow in China, but in general, you need to be able to read and write English to solve your problems. In short, in my experience, people use git, and all the frameworks/libraries you're thinking of.
> How about things like FP and niche languages - is there much appetite for people experimenting with new tech/languages or are Python/Java the defacto choices for application work and everything else shunned?
Again, in a research setting, it was just like working in a US company. Lots of vetting and decision making before choosing a route, but never discouragement for some fringe tool or idea that might artificially limit our capabilities.
> Is there a Chinese-equivalent to GitHub - is engineering in China big enough that they can have their own independent OSS culture? (Is companies contributing back to OSS a thing?)
There is not a Chinese fork of GitHub. Companies do give back to OSS (see Baidu, Ali, etc) and often if the OSS product is valuable enough the company just acquires the team (see GRPC -> BRPC -> acquired by Ali for internal use). My team frequently collaborated with outside contributors and would pull from OS. This is because my lab also ran VLDB so we obviously care for the community and realize there's a lot we can't do.
> EDIT: to add one last question - are developers seen as feature-factories or is the relationship between product and developers/tech more flat/harmonious than that?
IMO unless you're in research developers are just an expense, not people and they're there to fill desks. In China the average salary for a dev is much lower both because of the skill-cap but also the quantity. If you need someone to write an android app they're a dime a dozen. If you need someone to write a new framework, that's more difficult. So in general, getting people isn't hard, but getting good people is. Thus, the vast majority of people at companies are expendable. I think this can be distilled to one example. QQ the most popular messaging app from Tencent in the early 2000s had 6,000 Android developers (still does). WeChat (also run by Tencent but under a different management style) has only 50 devs. The difference is they realized quality > quantity in recent years and learned the value of ROI.
>QQ the most popular messaging app from Tencent in the early 2000s had 6,000 Android developers (still does). WeChat (also run by Tencent but under a different management style) has only 50 devs.
This comment alone almost tells me everything I need to know - my impression is that tech used to be run like giant sweatshops or cost centre (like QQ) but progressively tech is more like a value generator.
>A watered down fork of Agile is really common. At both companies, I've experienced poor management.
Have you heard of other peers in China faring better? Do managers believe in the whole "Organization Y" self organizing/autonomous philosophy that underpins agile?
As a foreign developer (who isn't a research-level programmer) do I bring valuable skills to the table? As someone who didn't do a CS degree would that be career limiting?
> Have you heard of other peers in China faring better? Do managers believe in the whole "Organization Y" self organizing/autonomous philosophy that underpins agile?
It depends on the company. The more westernized the better the likelihood for good management. In general I’d assume looser than what you’d expect and then some.
> As a foreign developer (who isn't a research-level programmer) do I bring valuable skills to the table? As someone who didn't do a CS degree would that be career limiting?
Depends on the company. I can’t speak to all (I have interviewed with quite a few) but China is very meritocratic, meaning that if you don’t have a degree most places won’t even give you the time of day. This might be different at a startup but it is very situational. Also realize that getting a foreigner a work visa puts a huge strain on the company and many will opt to ignore you for that reason alone. Many startups will do this under the table but I wouldn’t recommend that if you want to stay in China as a career path.
I think there was a conference for Rust in China a month ago or something and it seemed to have ok turnout, but I have no real data on it. Just as a small answer to your "FP and small languages" question.
This is great. The US has effectively (if unwittingly) given the biggest step in history towards actually decentralizing some of the most critical web services away from being under the control of a single government. I legit hope they keep doubling down on this policy, as we all win from this course of action.
I hope that the outcome you describe occurs. However, it seems equally likely that a centralised alternative will appear in China, just as there are local Chinese variants of the services Google, FB, et al. provide. Indeed, this would be in the interests of the government, who would then be able to have GitHub without the political ructions that accompany it.
Using technology/standard/service provided by US based private companies introduce risks. We are not just 'use/steal' these technologies/standard, we also heavily invest, enrich ecosystem, build services on top of them, that means if US government kill it at any time, those investments may lost too.
Based on my experience, Chinese government is so incompetent that it can't create an alternative, or initiate one, at least in the Internet industry, also China have to do business with other countries(other than US), so clearly create a private tech/standard stack is not an option. That means big companies like Huawei/Tencent/Alibaba/Baidu will start/continue to support&invest more in true open technologies, like linux/risk-v, perhaps favor true oss communities rather than google/fb owned oss projects(like android/arm/tensorflow).
Companies in countries other than China and US should also think about this risk, today US is banning Huawei, you may think it's all because China is evil, similar things happened for Japan 2 decades ago, and may still possible for India(if its population and GDP growth rate continues).
it's not all black and white like that. Chinese govt has been encouraging violating patents and corporate espionage for decades now. At the same time, it's threatening all its neighbors. The issue is not the population/GDP growth. The issue is that China wants to run the world, and USA doesn't want to give up its mantle.
A code hosting service that can be persuaded to not host projects that can inconvenience the government (or party)? I guess this sounds attractive to a certain kind of people.
Where "certain kind of people" would be "all people in China" since their options would be limited to either (a) use said service or (b) not access the blocked original version.
Ceteris paribus, a blocked service is better than no service, yes. But (1) VPNs exist, (2) decentralisation is surely not so infeasible as to rule out evasion of various blocks, and (3) the government might even decide to prioritise scientific development over absolute political control. (Certainly it seems that the scientists within the party are agitating for freer access to foreign papers.)
Thing is, even if countries go full-on isolationist and block all foreign websites, it only takes one hole in the dam for traffic to flow through. It's not like they're going to change the protocols so the separate networks are no longer compatible.
What you said is true. However, if the said country is determined to go full-on isolationist, they have other means to prevent people from using the "holes", like creating laws to go after the people.
As the article points out, Github remains unblocked due to it's economic importance to developers, despite it hosting material such as the 996 protest.
If Github were to be rebuilt in China, I do not believe that it would be redesigned with decentralization as a guiding principle. The Government would view this as a great opportunity to 'fix' issues with the current setup. The replacement would be receive funding from the Government and it would be designed with national interests (as defined by the Government) forefront in mind.
The good news is that according to @decster in a cousin comment, it may be the case that the Government is sufficiently incompetent that this may not be a risk. On the other hand, incompetence in Government hasn't stopped bad ideas from being forced on people in the past, so...
Perhaps people will start realising that using Github is both handing your code to a third party and hosting it in the USA, with all the consequences these choices entail.
Have they taken the step towards decentralizing, or are they creating more reasons for people to make that step instead? I guess in some contexts that counts as the step anyway...
Github has already been blocked by China, albeit briefly. After Chinese bloggers posted 'sensitive' content on the site, Github was blocked for a few days in 2013 until there was a big pushback from developers in China, including Kai Fu Lee, who's well respected by tech and government in China. The outcry forced a backtracking from the government.
I wouldn't recommend this, but if a movement started where developers of highly popular projects started putting political content in their README.md, China would probably revisit the issue and consider blocking again.
Just like it happened on the past with PGP, this is just yet another step for countries to start thinking about whom they want their tech stacks to depend on.
EDIT: Just imagine this taken to the extreme, OS, programming languages, libraries, any product being developed by US companies.
git-ssb is pretty nice, and I'd recommend anyone interested to check it out! The last time I checked it out it suffered from some incompatibility bugs from different parts of the stack, though, which are sadly not unusual with a project with such a large surface area and high code churn.
Mailing lists. Many providers, easy setup. Pull requests are an artificial addition to git workflow, it was designed with email patches as the main way to send contributions. Bug tracking is fine with mailing lists too.
Mailings lists (and e-mail as such) are seriously cumbersome to use as a way to send contributions and even more so when you want to track bugs. Every email archive software also looks like it was made in the 80s and is disgusting, slow and unreasonably difficult to use and also lacks any kind of organizational features that issue trackers have. It is absolutely not "fine", it's borderline tolerable at best.
So you are saying that sending an e-mail is seriously cumbersome? Excuse me, but for me it is a lot more steps from local edit to a contribution using Github. For Github I (1) have to create a fork (2) set it as a remote in my local copy, or if I forgot how to do it, (2.1) pull another one and copy my changes to it, (3) push my changes to my fork, (4) open a pull request in Github, which takes 3 context switches. Meanwhile for email I (1) look at README to find the email of development mailing list, (2) set it up for git send-email(https://git-send-email.io/) and (3) send my patches upstream, all with me staying withing my editor with an integrated terminal. No need to open up gmail or thunderbird, or even mutt or aerc. Contribution workflow is a lot more streamlined. If you don't like mailing lists for issue tracking, there is git-bug or plethora of different bugtracking software for you.
How do you deal with continuous integrations and making sure things like CLAs are signed? How does issue tracking integrate there? Answer: it doesn't, it's all a major PITA to arrange.
> For Github I (1) have to create a fork (2) set it as a remote in my local copy, or if I forgot how to do it, (2.1) pull another one and copy my changes to it, (3) push my changes to my fork, (4) open a pull request in Github, which takes 3 context switches.
You mean you don't create a fork by cloning the repository onto your PC when using e-mail? Or that somehow `git send-email` is harder than `git push`? I disagree having done both. I'd gladly remove `send-email` from git for it's negative effects on FOSS, it's clearly making people think it's somehow nice to use or start using.
> there is git-bug or plethora of different bugtracking software for you.
All of them are absolutely terrible to use. The sooner all FOSS migrates to Gitlab the better - we're stifling FOSS' progress by using tools majorly out-of-date.
>How do you deal with continuous integrations and making sure things like CLAs are signed? How does issue tracking integrate there?
The same way that you do that on github: many mailing lists can send webhooks on email received, and then it's up to your CI and CLA bot to respond to that email accordingly.
> You mean you don't create a fork by cloning the repository onto your PC when using e-mail?
I mean that you must open up a browser, open the main project repository, click fork, and wait for a minute for the forking to complete so that I would be able to push to my github fork now. I don't need to waste my time doing such stuff when using email.
> Or that somehow `git send-email` is harder than `git push`?
`git send-email` is just as easy as `git push` and I see additional benefit in it integrates you message to maintainers too, not having to write it separately
> I'd gladly remove `send-email` from git
Good luck trying to do that, Linux, arguably the biggest and the most important project out there, the one for which git was originally created, still happily lives using email and mailing lists.
>for it's negative effects on FOSS, it's clearly making people think it's somehow nice to use or start using.
Excuse me, WTF? How is it negative exactly? It lets FOSS be vendor independent, it allows big projects to exist. Linux, PostgreSQL, *BSD, even git itself, uses email to collaborate. Clearly there is no negative impact as these projects are so successful.
> All of them are absolutely terrible to use.
My experience is quite the contrary. While the interfaces aren't necessarily the most beautiful thing you've seen, they have all the most common actions easily reachable. Sending bug reports to Mozzila, PostgreSQL, etc. was a good experience for me.
> The sooner all FOSS migrates to Gitlab the better.
Have you've even read the first comment of this thread? It is asking about distributed git. All of the FOSS migrating to Gitlab is a highly negative thing in my opinion. Firstly it doesn't leave space for using email, which a lot of big projects have accustomed to using, and migrating to another workflow would be a massive burden, and could discourage old contributors from contributing. Secondly, that puts all of the FOSS projects in one basket, making them more vulnerable for intervention. If <nation> wanted to deny access of FOSS projects for <another-nation>, it would just have to exercise power on Gitlab, which could fly under the radar of mainstream media, while if it was hosted on plethora of platforms <nation> would have to exercise power on all of those, which definitely couldn't go unnoticed.
Gitlab and github issue tracking isn't even that good. Many bigger projects use many states of bugs, like confirmed, in_progress, duplicate, etc. Github and gitlab just have open/closed, and that isn't good. If you want to find some bug to work on, it is a lot easier to filter on confirmed, than to look through the open bugs to find one that is confirmed, isn't being worked on by someone else, and isn't a duplicate of a bug that someone else is working on. All that Github and Gitlab bug tracker has is pretty UI, which doesn't mean good UX.
>we're stifling FOSS' progress by using tools majorly out-of-date.
The fact that those tools were created a long time ago, doesn't mean that they just stayed in those years. Tools are constantly being worked on. Linux was started in 1990s. Is it majorly out-of-date? I wouldn't say so. If it is, why are we all using it?
> Claiming you don't clone the repository to your local PC is just false and will probably take more time than it does on GH.
I clone the upstream repository first, if I see a project I want to poke at, I don't instantly fork and clone my fork.
> > Excuse me, WTF?
> This is what I ask every time I see someone saying e-mail is an okay way to do contributions, continuous integration and issue tracking.
I think you forgot this: "It lets FOSS be vendor independent, it allows big projects to exist. Linux, PostgreSQL, *BSD, even git itself, uses email to collaborate. Clearly there is no negative impact as these projects are so successful."
> It negatively affects basically every component of development for everyone not accustomed to the bad tooling.
There is such thing as a good contributor. Some rando that quits on not knowing how to use a bug tracker isn't a good contributor. Somebody who takes time to learn how to use the tooling will be more beneficial to the project, than a bunch of one-time contributors whose contributions just take time to look at from main contributors. I think that having some barrier of entry really helps to conserve the time of the maintainers.
> > Secondly, that puts all of the FOSS projects in one basket
> You are out-of-touch to the possibilities available right now, Gitlab can be self-hosted.
You can build your own Chromium, but that doesn't change the fact that the web engines are getting centralized. "I only need to test on Chrome" and such. The same with hosting. The fact that you can self-host Gitlab doesn't change the fact that if everyone is hosting on Gitlab, you are putting all of the tooling to one vendor. It will devolve into "But it works on Gitlab CI".
> Sending bug reports to those companies using GH/GL has been a way better experience for me.
And would you think of the maintainers? Managing GH/GL bug tracking is difficult, as it lack features. No advanced statuses means that maintainers have to rely on hacky statuses using labels, which can get hairy really quick.
> So what? There's a lot of old and bad "protocols" we've killed.
Oh, like HTTP and FTP? Oh, wait, we're still using those. Maybe IRC? Oh wait, that is still used in development. Should we kill all of those? They are definetly old and have problems. You know what is also old and has problems? Walking by foot. So lets stop walking by foot and use bikes everywhere. Oh, you can't ride a bike in a building? Seems like we'll need to change our buildings too!
> I clone the upstream repository first, if I see a project I want to poke at, I don't instantly fork and clone my fork.
And that takes at least as much as time as pressing fork does. Leaving pull request flow at least no slower than sending a patch. That's what you were claiming at start.
> Some rando that quits on not knowing how to use a bug tracker isn't a good contributor.
How do you know that a person who doesn't want to spend time on terrible tooling isn't a good contributor? Are you using a crystal ball?
> Somebody who takes time to learn how to use the tooling will be more beneficial to the project,
Or let's just focus on working on the code not spending time on the cumbersome tooling? That'd be even more beneficial.
> You can build your own Chromium, but that doesn't change the fact that the web engines are getting centralized.
Let's talk about this "issue" when GitLab, a FOSS solution, owns 10% of the marketshare.
> Clearly there is no negative impact as these projects are so successful.
Only very few FOSS projects are that successful, who knows how many more would be if better tooling were used from the start.
> It will devolve into "But it works on Gitlab CI".
And you claim it hasn't for Makefiles, awful automake, e-mail systems? If anything the use of newer tools reduces the monoculture and stagnation.
> Managing GH/GL bug tracking is difficult, as it lack features.
> No advanced statuses means that maintainers have to rely on hacky statuses using labels, which can get hairy really quick.
How big of a percent really uses "advanced statuses"? Clearly looking at Linux "advanced statuses" are not needed for even the biggest of projects. Systemd also manages very fine on GH.
> Oh, like HTTP and FTP? Oh, wait, we're still using those.
Thankfully both are dying. If you start bringing up stuff just for the sake of "see, old stuff is being used, it must be good" then keep in mind some countries also have gay people lynched, must be good, right? (Of course not.)
> Maybe IRC? Oh wait, that is still used in development.
But IRC's numbers are minuscule compared to all others. It pretty much shows that it's not as good as other solutions.
> Walking by foot. So lets stop walking by foot and use bikes everywhere. Oh, you can't ride a bike in a building? Seems like we'll need to change our buildings too!
Oh, the building is 5 stories, let's use stairs only! No, that's not how it works, we build elevators and escalators because stairs are not convenient. Oh, btw, there also are buildings where bikes and scooters are used.
As another data point, I've seen more contribution and feedbacks to https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug (distributed bug tracker) than I expected from the chinese community.
"Fears about losing access to GitHub might be overblown. Apache Software Foundation (ASF), another US-based organization that offers open source software, published an announcement on Wednesday saying that open source software and collaboration on open source code are not subject to the EAR."
just that. it says it on the article even.
and honestly, any of the chinese giants now using github would have plenty of resources and probarbly motivation to set up a similar service if worst comes to worst. then people collaborating with chines would just hop over to that as reverse direction should be just fine to collaborate.
The concern is losing access to packages and repositories. Sure the code isn’t subject to EAR, but their distribution mechanisms sure as shit are (as in, their digital properties).
Worst comes to worse software in China is all built on old/ outdated packages they already have in the country.
You can't talk about GitHub in China without talking about 996.
Github is the only western 'social network' that is allowed to operate in China with strong encryption. That means it's the only place to talk about politically sensitive issues without being censored or harassed.
Guessing your a bit new to the dev world? They tried in 2013 then developers and companies lost their shit. However in 2015 China did ddos Github for its hosting of tools to circumvent the great firewall. Github was dead for an entire day
Is this just about Github Enterprise Server? If so, the article doesn't really make that clear, and it seems like a red herring. AFAIK Microsoft does not currently restrict access to Github.com to any country, and they even make a censorship-friendly version of LinkedIn for the PRC.
Perhaps, but also a huge number of public OSS projects.
To take an example of a large OSS Project hosted on Github: The Microsoft .NET Core framework[1].
If I want to contribute a code change - their guidelines require me to submit a pull request on github.
If I want to submit an issue - their guidelines also require me to log the issue on github.
This is not unusual for most OSS projects which use Github as their central collaboration point.
Today that's all A-OK for Chinese devs. The scenario discussed is if the trade-war extends, and either the US or Chinese governments block access to Github for Chinese users.
Now, perhaps it's easy enough for someone to set up a mirror copy of everything in China - but that's going to limit or block collaboration. Bug fixes, changes, issues - they're not going to get across as easily. I can't email a pull request to the .NET CoreFX team saying "Hey, I fixed this".
This is going to lead to fragmentation of popular OSS projects, and will be an overall net-loss for everyone.
It could also be about Github private repos, which cost money, and therefore are a business relationship. If Huawei has a private repo on Github, is Microsoft now required to delete their account?
Back when Microsoft aquired github, concerned users created "Teahub" which turned into Codeberg. It's a German non-profit with the website https://codeberg.org/
Git and Github are are like philosophically opposed. Git is distributed. Who cares if a hosting server is lost? 5 minutes and you're up on a different server.
The first two can be done without github. You can also run your own publicly accessible git repository. It might not have the friendly web interface but it will do all the git stuff.
Not if youre Joe Chinese Dev wanting to collaborate with an OSS project hosted on Github. "Hey, can you guys move everything to this service that doesn't block China so I can send you push requests/issues/etc" is probably going to go nowhere.
Sure they can. You find a dev working on that project and say "Hey, can you make your git repository public so I can push some commits to you?" As far as git (not GitHub) is concerned, every local copy of the repository is just as much the "true" one as the one hosted on GitHub, and you can push commits to any of them, which will get merged in when a GitHub committer pushes to GitHub's remote.
I was doing some analytics on various crypto projects on GitHub, and was surprised by the number of them that had authors without GitHub accounts. These show up in the commit API as having 'author' and/or 'committer' as null (the commit itself has an author that's whatever you set your "git config user.name/email", which may not be a registered GitHub user). You have to handle these cases or your analytics script will crash very soon, because it's a pretty common case.
Sure, if a project insists on staying on github. But a lack of github does not mean you can't cooperate. You only miss the extra features that github adds. Which are certainly nice, but not essential to use git effectively.
They can use git. They can use mailing lists. They can use carrier pigeons to exchange pull requests. That's not what the concern is about.
If the OSS project says that all collaboration work has to happen on their Github projects, and Github's forced to block China - then Chinese devs would no longer able to collaborate.
They would need someone outside China to be willing to take their pull request/log an issue/etc.
Sure, but that's not the issue I'm addressing here. If a project insists on github no matter what, and github gets blocked, and the project keeps insisting on github, obviously that's a problem. Nobody is denying that. It's obvious.
My point is to underscore the point of the ancestor of this thread: that you (the project) don't need github. You can use all the strength of git without github.
It will be possible to create a bridge bot, between e.g. GitLab and GitHub, through their API to synchronize PRs, issues, commits, etc automatically. So this particular problem is solvable.
Git - the protocol - helps enable a distributed edit & merge ... but Git itself is not a Schelling Point. Github is a Schelling Point. (I made a previous comment about this conceptual difference.[0])
Likewise, the HTTP protocol can't be a Schelling Point but web nodes that use http like Facebook or HN can be Schelling Points.
(One can get pedantic and argue that pure protocols like git/http/tcpip can also be viewed as Schelling Points on a relative basis (compared to 1960s AT&T leased-lines) but we don't have to dissect that because the social congregation around sites like Github happens at a higher layer than the protocol.)
>Who cares if a hosting server is lost? 5 minutes and you're up on a different server.
Not only did both Google and Microsoft abandoned their own public code collaboration websites, they also both tried to acquire Github.[1] As we now know, MS had the better offer to Github's owners in 2018.
Both corporate giants had the money to run their own git-protocol compatible servers and yet they abandoned them for Github. Think about why did that.
Maybe the reasons are social, not technical? Therefore, spending 5 minutes to move a git repo to an unknown server doesn't actually accomplish the same thing Github accomplishes.
For practically every distributed or decentralized tech we have, there is a tech that complements it and at the same time negates it. The banal example is cryptocurrencies and centralized exchanges. Part of the reason is that there's just so much money to be made from centralization and monopolization, but it's surely not the whole story.
There are many other parts to this story of centralization, not all of them bad. Centralized solutions are always more efficient than decentralized ones, for both graph-theory reasons and economies of scale. They also tend to be more convenient to use for typical use cases. Centralization of trust also has utility. Then there are the nefarious reasons to centralize - control and influence.
Because, from FTFA - they're worried about Github, not git.
Huge amounts of OSS projects are hosted on Github - that's where their code is, their issues are. If you want to report issues or collaborate, you need to use Github.
The issue would also spread to other related tech, which integrates with Github.
Sure, there's ways around it, and more than likely Chinese devs would set up their own instances to work around the blocks - it would limit/reduce overall collaboration. A net-loss for everyone.
Git is not a search / discovery platform. Publish the same git repository to several platforms and you can collaborate in a distributed and decentralized way through each of those platforms.
Nothing stops you from publishing the same project to both github and gitlab.
Why would a project that's already happily working with the Github ecosystem want to also have to support publishing to a platform that doesn't block China? Lots more work on project maintainers.
Your description of what GitHub is is simplistic and reductionary. These sites are not simply about git repositories, but providing features _around_ git, e.g. CI/CD, issue tracking, wikis, project management, user permissions, contribution insights, etc. Those don't really migrate "in 5 minutes".
Distributed doesn't mean that noone makes choices.
If you want to file a PR you need access to whatever the maintainer chose. If the maintainer wants PRs via github and won't accept them via email, your alternatives are to access github, not submit the PR, or have a proxy access github for you. Possibly a human proxy.
Lots of people seem to derive value from Github, especially the social aspects and the exposure it gives to your project.
That said, I'd love a decentralised alternative based on IPFS or somesuch. There's probably something out there already, perhaps this may be impetus enough to cause devs to move? Seems unlikely.
This may be controversial, but that would be one of the few parts of the trade war that I wouldn’t mind.
Non-Chinese business must operate with a Chinese partner to do business in the mainland. Many assume that this structure is intended to leak secrets and the Chinese company will end up taking over and competing.
To be a “fair” actor in the global economy, China should allow foreign businesses to operate in the mainland, subject to Chinese law.
> Non-Chinese business must operate with a Chinese partner to do business in the mainland.
That isn’t true universally. Certain industries require (required?) JVs, most notably the car industry but also energy resources.
Most industries are free and clear and don’t require JVs. Microsoft, for example, has always operated independently in China, nor does Apple. Starbucks started out as a JV but has been getting its own store, especially in 2nd tiers.
As of last year, automobile manufacturers don't require joint ventures any more. As time goes on, the number of industries that require joint ventures is decreasing. The joint-venture requirement for automobile parts was removed in 1993, for example.
The thinking of the Chinese government was that as an undeveloped country, Chinese companies had no hope of directly competing against companies from the developed world. Chinese car manufacturers in 1990 would have simply been wiped out by Toyota, Ford, BMV et al. The Chinese government wanted foreign investment, so they created a middle ground, where foreign companies could exploit cheap Chinese labor and gain access to the growing Chinese market, but in which they would have to work with Chinese companies. This sort of policy makes sense for a developing country, which aspires to be more than a platform for cheap labor, but also to develop its own domestic capabilities. It actually follows in the tradition of a theory advanced by Alexander Hamilton, the "infant industry argument."
As know-how at Chinese companies has increased, however, these restrictions have started to make less sense. There are Chinese electric car companies (such as BYD) that can legitimately compete with foreign manufacturers now. As a consequence, JV requirements are also being scaled back.
It is basically the standard with all developing countries joining the WTO where by they are allowed and even encourage to do this as an under developed country.
The problem is China is no longer one, or at leats most countries doesn't think it is anymore. And has failed to abide by what they promised when they joined WTO. Or you can blame it on US for letting them joining without clear cut rules and terms in the first place.
China has plenty of developing and even in developed countries inside its borders, along with its mostly developed areas. It is kind of difficult to classify a country that is so huge and heterogeneous with respect to development levels.
Yes, and surprisingly enough, even in US and many part of Western Europe.
The problem is China has been playing their developing country card for far too long, and if we have to argue a Country with GDP that is either 1st or 2nd by different way of measurement as developing country I think we can agree to disagree.
(I had to look this up so I figured I'd comment to note it for anyone else who might, since the term isn't used in full anywhere in the article or parent comment chain - barring future edits.)
It depends on its strategic interest. ARM, AMD all have JV.
>Most industries are free and clear and don’t require JVs.
That is true only on paper. In reality they would still want a JV or some form of partnership. From Food Production, Restaurant Chains, to other part of the industries. If China wasn't desperate for Pork, ( Due to all sort of Pork disease ) they would not have allowed Danish Crown to operate independently after both have negotiate for years. You can try to register, but without some form of JV and somehow doing the "relationship" work for you. Nothing will get done.
It has changed over time. China went from having a positive list to a negative list, and ya, local implementation often lags behind central government initiatives by a few years.
Those aren’t JVs, which has a formal meaning anyways. They call it a partnership, or an operator agreement. Maybe the distinction is moot here, but they aren’t really working together, just they provide the machines and Microsoft provides everything else.
I think you mean, by the context of the comment, that is no longer true, maybe is not an ortographical skip and I am mistaken on this one
Just to clarify, is not a misundertanding, usually in english if someone says " is longer true" it means it is true for a long time, but in the context of the comment, I guess what you want to say is that what many people repeat is no true for a long time, usually what you would write in this case is
" Its no longer true"
Or " Its long not true"
But no misunderstanding, just a grammatical litle note, the meaning of your comment is simple to see by the context, so just a little note
There are many countries in the world where this is the case though. Many countries also have similar constraints that a company operating in certain regions has to have so many native citizens on its board of directors. People often call out China specifically for this because it is successful but there are tons of countries that do this practice.
I guess I've never understood why people think this matters. If they can get away with not having it a level playing field, with no adverse consequences for their markets, what incentive could they possibly have to level it? If there is no market incentive for an action they won't take it, simple as that. People who want to force regulation on them are literally trying to fight against the free market.
I think the problem is those same people turn around and get worked up when Trump puts tariffs up, when the same exact logic applies. Both are rational self-preservation techniques, but China gets a lot more sympathy for some reason with many here.
One reason people may not like the pushback against China (besides the source) is they are personally enriched in the status quo, and fear (correctly or not; time will tell) that a change will affect their enrichment.
It seems obvious, but it's worth repeating, a trade agreement can be a massive net negative for an entire country, but incredibly profitable for a few people.
its 1,000 times more likely that a software engineer trying to do business in China would enjoy a life of privilege and exemption from socioeconomic issues in China
just like someone from China would experience a life of privilege and exemption from socioeconomic issues in America after their parents paid a few million dollars for Stanford tuition, and I've met people that are afraid of America because of the civil rights issues seen on the news who are completely oblivious to the circumstances that would create them.
there is a tendency to focus on things that aren't really indicative of the experience you would have, and this has nothing to do with China specifically
The trade war makes no sense to me. My conservative family members are all for free markets without government intervention. Now they’re all angry about China. When American jobs went to China, they would have had a heart attack if an American official tried to dictate what these companies could or could not do. They went overseas so shareholders could increase profits. Meanwhile, China propped up so many of its industries, which was well within their rights to develop their country. So how are the Chinese bad guys here?
If anything, corporate America was greedy, and now corporate America feels threatened that China is growing too fast. You threw American workers under the bus and sent the jobs to China, but you were hoping China would stay poor. For all of its huge faults and despite the human rights abuses, the Chinese government can actually get things done as opposed to here with our annual traditions of government shutdown threats and now extended periods of actual shutdowns.
Look at the progress China made since 2000. What was America doing? Greed caused a recession, we’ve fought endless wars, where one of the chief architects is now head of NSA instead of being in prison. Sure we have more technology, but is the average American better off if you look at wages? We’re more divided than ever. The jobs numbers look great in 50 years? Great job! None of those people will be ever able to retire and don’t have $500 for an emergency.
If you believe that "intellectual property" is a "thing" (as many people do) then you may consider China's behaviour in this area (obtaining trade secrets illicitly, or forcing companies to reveal them as a condition for doing business in China, or breaking copyright law) to be theft and more than enough grounds for sanctions.
Even if you don't believe in "intellectual property", then you may still believe that a selective (not universal) and one-sided breaking of the relevant international and national IP laws, in favour of one country, is harmful.
In addition to that, there have been allegations (I'm not sure how true they are), that supposedly private Chinese companies have been supported by the Chinese government in ways that break WTO rules.
No one is forced to reveal secrets. Play ball with their rules or don’t business in China. Our own government forced tech companies to do certain things. Why can’t China set its own rules?
Sure I believe in IP. I also think other countries will do as they please when they know they will get away with it. Nation states behave in self interest and can have their own interpretations of what are black and white laws to you or me, especially so when they’re in a position of power. Or they can completely disregard international agreements. Case in point - the Iran deal.
>Play ball with their rules or don’t business in China.
If you don't manufacture in China, you can't compete with companies that do. As a result, every company is forced to sell out their future 20 years from now so that they don't go under today. Whether you think it's a good idea or not, government intervention is often necessary to coordinate industry-wide strategic things like "don't put poison in milk" and "don't take the sweet but deadly embrace of technology transfer."
You simultaneously believe in IP and are confused that American companies are upset by IP theft by Chinese companies? Why would they not be? It's not like they agreed to well-defined contracts trading away their IP. It's reasonable to be upset if you believe the other party in a contract has unilaterally broken it.
Being pro free market usually means you want level playing fields for companies. Now when you introduce governments that alter that playing field by refusing to enforce IP or by having asymmetric tariffs, that government is interfering with the free market.
Given that, most people I’ve talked to that are in agreement with the trade war view it as a necessary evil to force China to level the playing field. They don’t want a long term trade war.
Level playing fields is a gross simplification. Companies in the US have various advantages of the simple fact that they’re in a developed nation. Compare us to China 15 years ago. They wouldn’t get to where they are or stay on their current trajectory had their focus being in being “fair” to the West.
To be clear, American interests were grounded in asymmetric hegemony over Chinese market, not for some evil world domination goals but to fuel American profits. It didn’t turn out that way so now people cry about fairness.
> Companies in the US have various advantages of the simple fact that they’re in a developed nation.
The US isn't magically a developed nation. It is fortunate, sure. And it has absolutely made mistakes and ill-advised compromises for the sake of growth. But universities, factories, literacy, functioning judicial systems, and infrastructure don't fall out of the sky.
It's not arbitrary that developed nations are developed.
> Being pro free market usually means you want level playing fields for companies... force China to level the playing field...
i think different people have different meanings of free market... for some, the idea would be “let china set its own rules and let others choose or not to play by them” (libertarian) and to some it would be “we should all play [1] by the same open rules” (fair market)
to add to this, i would also claim, that what the average person is advocating for in this trade war is not “free” but “fair” markets, and this (trump/trade war) represents a strong rejection of neoliberal “free market” policies [2]
Do you think that corporate America somehow wants this trade war? I think it would have preferred to stay in the TPP trade deal and operate under a predictable regulatory environment.
I believe a large part is identity politics. A symptome is that a voter will agree with the policy of their preferred candidates, rather than choosing a candidate based on their preferred policy.
At the least republicans accuse democrats of being in identity politics and then practice extreme versions of it themselves. I like the op above us who sees the contradictions. 'Some (rich) Americans' don't like the choices that free american companies made to move their factories to China; they liked them before because it was more profits, now the Chinese are becoming too powerful.
There are more libertarian types who have been consistently for unrestricted trade. And there are patriotic types who see the role of government as booster-in-chief, taking the side of its companies whatever the implications are.
There are definitely people who use identity more than ideology to make decisions, and there are hypocrites, but it's not strictly useful to complain about them as if they are the only people in the discussion.
> For all of its huge faults and despite the human rights abuses, the Chinese government can actually get things done as opposed to here with our annual traditions of government shutdown threats and now extended periods of actual shutdowns.
A surveillance state can get a lot of things done. We could make our government work a lot differently here as well if you find their system better than ours.
One thing (might be many others) :Free markets are not free is the state subsidizes certain industries. They can dump the product for long enough to bankrupt others...
Not from the USA but I am intrigued you classify the relatives for the trade war as conservatives. Are they conservative in everything else or is this a position they hold. Do all conservatives hold the same position.
I am genuinely interested because I have always regarded myself as conservative even though I work in technology. I was one of the last to get a cellphone because when they entered the market they were too expensive so was airtime to make any calls. I tend to want to improve processes using current stack before jumping on a new technology stack. I am just not into the latest fashion, I literally wear the same two pairs of jeans to work every day (interchangeably). I am intrigued because in the US it seems being conservative has a "negative" connotation if I may say so. I have always seen myself as being more cautious and not jumping on every fad.
Hi, Canadian here. From what I've been able to gather, American conservatism is more of a tribe than an ideology, that holds many values under a big tent. Some of these values are at odds with each other.
I don't see much conservatism in republicans at all. They are not conserving the environment, they are not fiscally conservative, their politics has been starkly reactionary. At this point, I would say the label has lost all meaning.
Luckily, Americans can still vote for the Democratic party, a staunchly conservative party by all accounts.
As an U.S. American; I've always viewed our brand of conservatism as an ideology focused on fighting change (good or bad); thus, conserving our established policies or returning to established policies of the past (abortion rights, gay rights, etc.). Some people are scared of progressive policies or think that have set a precedent that is at odds with their values. They seem to spend a great deal of time worrying about the effects new policies will have on society. I try to have empathy and I wish fewer people were ideologues in the US and just viewed ideas as tools to solve problems. Just like in the tech industry, people get it in their heads that something works at solving a problem so they try to solve every problem with it. The world is gray, not black and white.
As an outsider I guess I am sometimes confused at partisanship. I get it though being conservative in the US seems to be a political position whereas where I am from being conservative is aunt Pat telling you real gentlemen wear a suit to work and muttering under their breath how the youth of today have lost the plot. It's more of a character/personality trait as opposed to an ideology. I have always thought we needed both types of people the ones that jump at new things and the ones that kind of say hold a minute before we swap out this full stack can we just define what problem we are solving.
I mostly agree with you; however, I think it a personality trait that leads to an ideology. Most people in the US are middle of the road. It is somewhat unfortunate that our two party system has increasingly push candidates to either extreme to appeal to their very loud bases.
I think in general, conservatives seem to want to see a policy work somewhere else first before adopting it nationally. That is why, imho, states rights are so important to them. However, when they do get power, they try to rush whatever changes they want through. Nevermind the fact that both parties are corrupted by money. So, like many people, their leaders seem to be hypocrites; they use arguments that appeal to conservative ideals, but only as an attempt to suppress the liberal ideas.
You make a good point on the problems associated with a two party system. Most issues in the world are not binary but unfortunately the world seems to simplify things to either you with us or against us. No one is better for it. Seems mainland Europe is slightly different. They seems to have a few large parties and the governments tend to be coalitions. So the big parties win about 30% of the vote. I can't speak for how effective it is but it feels right to me. As humans surely there isn't just two types of us.
> American conservatism is more of a tribe than an ideology
The American conservative movement is very much ideological, though certainly a minority these days. Influential conservative magazines and columnists pointedly withheld endorsements or actively campaigned against "the tribe" you're describing.
> I don't see much conservatism in republicans at all.
Conservatives believe in the classically liberal principles of the American founding: the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the thinkers that informed those things. They are conserving a democratic republic based on the idea of inalienable rights. That is one of the things that is unique about American conservatism compared to European and even Canadian conservatism. There isn't a language, a monarchy, some historical border, some ethnicity, or official state religion to conserve.
Conservatives also believe in non-government institutions, principally the family, but also private organizations.
Anyway, there's not much action going on in Washington at all these days. That's not to say there's no conservative action in the last couple decades. Appointment of judges cleared through the Federalist Society probably counts. The deconstruction of campaign finance regulations probably counts.
He got it right in reality. Republicans say they are conservatives, their conference is cpac has conservative in the name, they use that word incessantly. but it just means self-interested power that cloaks itself misleadingly in that conservative is good.
that website has one really annoying ad system. For me, scrolling down the page scrolls down the ads, not the page ... the state of content in 2019 ...
What about Google blocking Android access from Huawei? Have they been forced to make that decision as well? I don't see them complaining, possibly to still have the government available as a possible customer and because they got harmed by the Chinese government's trade policies themselves.
Similarly, Microsoft has the US government as a customer too. They might instruct GitHub leadership to not complain and simply follow the requests by the US government.
> Have they been forced to make that decision as well?
Duh? Huawei was added to the US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security Entity List. You were imagining that after years of successful open collaboration with Huawei that Google woke up one morning and decided to screw them? You should take some time and re-evaluate what biases have skewed your perspective to such an extent that you were prepared to believe such an unreasonable thing.
Apple actually refused to help the FBI in the iphone case, at least that's the public story. When Trump issued his muslim ban, quite many tech companies issued public statements that condemned it. Google themselves had a letter to their employees. Yet in this instance, they not only comply, they also don't issue any statements of reluctance, at least none that I could find.
Surely, that sentence of mine was exaggerating. They clearly were forced. But they certainly don't care much about it or their reaction would have been different.
One of the main difference between the muslim ban and huawei ban is how sentiment towards muslims in California, and to an extension, the liberal circles, which those tech executives belong to.
Muslims are generally sympathized in those circles, while huawei, and to a lesser extent, China, does not garner any sympathy, so the executives feel no moral obligation to condemn this.
But ignoring that, it seems to me like increasingly we're wanting distributed (dare I even say: federated) code forges even outside of China as people realize quite how overly and dangerously centralized their infrastructure and company are over Github.