On the 9th anniversary of the birth of Gitee, the three leaders behind Open Source China broadcast live in the same frame for the first time, and conducted a talk show-style sharing of "open mouth". The three bosses had no official words, and their super down-to-earth speeches made the audience call Gitee's leadership office "the Deyun Society of the open source world".
Ma Yue: CEO of Open Source China, an elite programmer from overseas, an intellectual with open source sentiments, and an idealistic entrepreneur who had the highest personal debt of 180 million for Open Source China.
Xu Yong: Open source China COO, a pragmatic big brother, born in ace sales, worried about the company's financial problems, the only official designated leader to lead villains, claiming to have no feelings for open source.
Sweet Potato: The founder and CTO of Open Source China, who is funny and responsible, a romantic programmer who claims to be forever 19 years old, an open source enthusiast who does not want to work, a strong hairstyle, and Luo Jiaying in the open source world.
Li Yancheng: The technical director of Gitee, a young and handsome host, with good looks and technical strength far beyond the level of the host.
Without further ado, let's see what topics the three bosses with different personalities talked about under the host's "coercion"!
Topic 1: The origin of Gitee: Is it plagiarizing GitHub?
Topic 2: Shocked, Gitee was almost acquired by GitHub and GitLab! ?
Topic 3: What happened to Gitee's recent audit storm?
Dude, are these really free to say? ? ?
Did Gitee copy GitHub to start?
Moderator: Speaking of the origin of Gitee, some people on the Internet say that we are copying GitHub. What do you think of this?
Sweet Potato: GitHub is indeed a very good and arguably the best open source platform at present. Whether it is from data or from all aspects of products, I believe no one will have any objection to this.
In the early days, we wanted to provide you with such a code hosting service. This kind of service is not available everywhere. At that time, there was only GitHub in the world, and the others were based on SVN and other previous generation technologies. , we did do some things in the early days - if it sounds good, it is a reference, and if it sounds bad, we just copy it first .
This was indeed the case in the past few years, but with the growth of users, we began to introduce some small innovations and improvements for domestic developers on the basis of the original, so that they would be more accustomed to using it. Because I am an old programmer myself, I put my own code on it every day, and I also have my own usage demands.
So we later started to do a lot of work that was differentiated from GitHub.
Speaking of which, in the last two years, GitHub has borrowed something from us (laughs). Since the last time GitHub's former CEO, Nat Friedman, came to visit our company -- which I remember happened to be the day when GitHub was down for 24 hours globally -- he's been at our company himself. Because we were still cooperative at the time, we basically told him all the various things we did without reservation. Later, we found that after he went back, many of the new things on GitHub were the ideas on our Gitee at that time...
So I don't think there is any problem with this, and it's good for everyone to learn from each other.
For now, in fact, we have been making some functions that are more in line with the habits of domestic developers. For example, we may soon have an integration function of the Contributor Agreement, which will make it more convenient for everyone. Go to the website to collect and sort out these agreements.
Then we are actually doing much better than GitHub in enterprise management, because GitHub's enterprise version is basically a relatively simple collaboration tool, and what we do is a very complete enterprise collaborative development environment.
Ma Yue: I add two points. As far as copying or not copying GitHub, I think so.
First, the purpose of our open source is inclusiveness. The more people use my code, the happier we are, right? And we didn't have too many interest appeals at the beginning, which was a universal and altruistic purpose, so it is inevitable for us to learn GitHub. The end result of learning it is that in 9 years, we now have 8 million users on Gitee, more than 200,000 teams, and nearly 20 million code repositories.
This matter has persisted for 9 years and now, we still have more than 10,000 new registered users and more than 20,000 new code warehouses every day. It is not important to copy this matter. Such a market size shows that our users There is an objective demand for it. In the past 9 years, we have actually become a technical carrier of China's open source ecosystem.
Some people raise the question of whether to copy or not. I think it is a false proposition for us. What we care about is whether it can benefit the vast majority of Chinese developers. This is our core value. changed.
We are also proud to have friends like GitHub and GitLab. Because they are the forerunners, or leaders, of open source anyway. In a sense, we also have our late-mover advantage along the way, which is to stand on their shoulders and continue to walk out of our Gitee characteristics, so we respect them. In other words, what should be learned, and even some should be copied in the future, must be copied.
Second, we are proud to find that Gitee has come to this day, such as Gitee index, such as our CopyCat, such as our license guide, such as our Mulan protocol guide function, our code reward function, etc., are all Our own creativity. You'll find on GitHub that they also copied some of our features. On the one hand, the reason why these functions exist is that the developers have needs, and the developers asked us to do them. On the other hand, we don't care about copying for them at all, and we welcome them to copy, because both he and we are all about serving the developers wholeheartedly, and we don't have to worry about copying or not.
Xu Yong: Let me add that no matter what, we must look at it from two aspects, not just one. In fact, Gitee's influence has gone abroad. So far, about 25% of Gitee's daily traffic comes from overseas.
Shock! Gitee was almost bought by GitHub and GitLab?
Moderator: There were rumors before that GitHub and GitLab both wanted to acquire Gitee. Can Mr. Ma and Mr. Xu reveal the secret?
Xu Yong: Let me talk about GitHub first. I have personally experienced this.
In July and August 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub. Nat Friedman is a white American elite. He made a very successful framework (Xamarin) before, and later sold the project to Microsoft, which is how he was paid by Microsoft. Then Microsoft felt that he was very capable in open source, and appointed him as the CEO of GitHub.
At that time, three of them came to visit our company. In addition to Nat, there was also the CTO of GitHub at that time, and now the new CEO of GitHub - a small German man with a strong German accent and hair like sweet potatoes. Much, maybe a little more than sweet potatoes.
There was also a woman who was GitHub's vice president of marketing at the time, and three people came to visit.
Nat Friedman listened to us for 1 hour. After the talk, because they were short on time, they had to visit 6 customers a day. They stayed with us for two hours, and when they went out, they were the CTO at that time. Now The CEO of the company is a small German. His business card is still with me. I forgot his name. It seems to be Thomas Dohmke. He suddenly asked me: "Does your company sell it?"
I have forgotten how I answered him at the time. I only remember that my answer seemed very spineless (laughs). I probably said at the time: "We haven't considered this matter, but everything is possible! " I gave such an answer Answer, because no one thought that people would be interested in our small company at the time, you know?
As a result, immediately after this incident, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took a special plane to visit China, and then went directly from Beijing Airport to Wangjing. He stayed in China for a total of 6 hours, of which half an hour or 15 minutes made an appointment with Open Source China. Sweet potato and Ma Yue went to see him. Nadella If you don't know what he looks like, now look at the sweet potato, just smear the sweet potato on the camera a little bit, Nadella looks like him.
Then Nadella met Sweet Potato and the others for ten minutes, gave his assistant's phone number, and told him to go back and talk more.
Later, the acquisition of Open Source China seems to have nothing to do with it. Of course, Microsoft also maintained a lot of contact with us later, maybe their strategy still needs something, but we never mentioned this matter, and we were not very active, so let it be. This is our fate with GitHub.
Ma Yue, talk about GitLab.
Ma Yue: We still talked a lot with Satya Nadella, and then he asked me to talk more with Nat Friedman. I think we didn't have a trade war, and it was so difficult to pay wages. It would be nice to have a thigh. .
But selling the company is probably not necessarily realistic, right? Because it lost its neutral position in the Chinese market. So to be honest, there was nothing to do with this matter back then, and then it was 2019 with GitLab.
At the beginning of 2019, our company began to look for financing. At that time, I thought that domestic capital might not be able to see clearly in our business. Maybe overseas capital would be more successful in this open source, especially platform-based business.
So during the period around the Spring Festival in 2019, I have been meeting various investors in the United States. The most valuable and interesting section is February 14, 2019, Valentine's Day, when I knocked on the tallest building in downtown Millington, San Francisco - the one that got crooked on the news - the Millennium Building One of the doors of my apartment, as soon as I enter the door, it is a very large apartment. The entrance is in the living room. There are 6 large screens on the wall. Who is the one who receives me? I still can't pronounce his name, because there are no vowels in his name, it's just a string of letters, called Sid for short - Sid Sijbrandij.
This person is the current CEO of GitLab. He is Dutch. At that time, he told me: "We all work remotely. There are more than 600 people in the world. You see, I command the world with these 6 big screens." I also took a photo at the time, which was fine. The two of us had a great time seeing each other, and he took a look at all of our Gitee stuff, including our public cloud website, private cloud product plans, and more.
On that day, Sid and I were quite sympathetic to each other, and then he said: " Let's join together to fight against GitHub. I have confidence in making tools, but I have no influence on the public cloud. From public cloud and open source Ecologically speaking, you are now number two in the world, why don't we get along. "
How to fit? That old man is very interesting. He is an absolute engineer. Even the listing of the IPO must be accurate to a certain year, a certain month, and a certain day. On February 14, 2019, he told me: "I will be on November 2021. It will be listed on the 28th. So you see, I will give you an offer, we will exchange shares, and we will list together in the United States, how about it?”
I still didn't answer.
After I came back, I talked to Lao Xu and Sweet Potato. We may have missed the biggest opportunity for wealth freedom in our lives, because if we exchanged shares with him, when he went public, everyone looked at the market value of GitLab. How high was the market value when it went public .
Xu Yong: They have fallen very sharply now, and they have fallen to a fraction of US$5 billion, which was more than US$20 billion that year.
Ma Yue: $5 billion. If I sold it to him back then, Lao Xu and Sweet Potato would be free now, right?
Then why didn't you sell it to him?
It's because we were ready to undertake important projects in some countries, and then we talked to the leaders of relevant departments, saying that in China, a hot spot for open source developers, we have been doing it for so long, and we are not like the past today. If you are alone in the fight, if you do one thing right, you will be able to get more help. Investors in our country, large technology companies, and more local developers will all support us, so we still have to keep this fire in China.
So we decided to be rooted in China when we thought about it back then, and we still hoped to be able to do something more convenient for us.
Xu Yong: Ma, you are nonsense! You belong to putting gold on your face! I will talk about why we rejected Sid at that time.
First, at that time, we did have investors in China who gave us a higher offer than Sid. Zuckerberg’s Facebook invested $100 million in Sid’s GitLab, and other capital invested $100 million, so he was The valuation is 1 billion US dollars. He gave us 10% and only 100 million US dollars. The 100 million US dollars is converted into RMB. But someone in China gave us a valuation of 1.3 billion to invest in us, which is half of the money, right?
Another, let's look back at the old horse. On the one hand, the core problem is that its valuation was not that high at the time, and another key factor is that he proposed an additional clause - requiring the Open Source China team to replace all public clouds with His, all product codes of the private cloud were given up and all of his products were used. This was equivalent to making us "hand in the gun", so we directly refused at that time.
Full-time focus: Gitee's recent review turmoil
Moderator: Finally, we enter into the issue that everyone is most concerned about, which is the recent warehouse audit incident. This incident has also been on the hot search on Zhihu before, and there are even many Up masters of station B who have made some videos to interpret this matter. For example, the very popular "Gitee Office", I would like to ask Brother Shu to come out and talk about it.
Sweet Potato: Yes, on the 18th of May, we made a change that made us very painful, really painful!
I believe that everyone has learned through various channels. From that day on, on the Gitee platform, if a project is to be publicly accessible to everyone, we need to conduct manual review.
We now have nearly 20 million code repositories, 1/3 of which are open source, which is equivalent to 6 million repositories that are publicly accessible. This stock itself is very large, and the whole review situation is very serious. Therefore, our changes this time will feel that the first is very sudden, and the second is very radical.
But there is no such thing as taking off the shelves or deleting the warehouse as some media said - this will not happen! ! !
Our changes are as follows: First of all, there will be no changes to the original private warehouse. The private warehouse is everyone's own warehouse. Our own developers do not have permission to deal with it, and we will not do anything.
Secondly, some open source projects that have been reviewed as high-quality categories will not be affected in any way, including mainstream open source projects we often use, GVP projects (Gitee's most valuable projects), and projects recommended by our content editors for starring, these We have handled all projects well in advance.
In addition, for other warehouses, the warehouse author needs to submit an application for a public warehouse on the edit page of the warehouse, and then we will have special staff to review whether the warehouse is suitable for public disclosure. The slowest review time is 24 hours. In fact, we have dealt with it recently, and basically it will not take more than an hour to review it.
So what exactly are we reviewing? Mainly some sensitive content, such as publishing illegal software, political remarks, pornographic pictures or videos , etc. Only these illegal warehouses will be treated as "undisclosed". In fact, 99.999% of warehouses will not be affected.
The amount of these illegal content is relatively small, but once they appear, it is a very deadly content. It's basically a matter of a fly spoiling a pot of soup. In order to eliminate these contents, many normal users are affected.
As a developer myself, including 3 of the 4 people here today are developers, we also know that doing this will be very painful and troublesome for developers, and our company needs to invest extra in this matter. cost, which is an unprofitable thing for our company, and we are very reluctant to do it.
Next, we hope to use technical means to minimize the impact of the review operation on everyone. It is expected that in about another week or two, the entire review process will become basically a process that is insensitive to users.
Because I have been paying attention to the reports of the whole community and the outside media on this matter, and I have also seen many programmers write interesting jokes, and everyone is indeed very talented.
Here I am very grateful for everyone's attention to the Gitee platform. Of course, some media have used some inaccurate expressions. Here I still want to make some clarifications:
The first point is that there is no such thing as an open source project being taken off the shelf! Only a very small number of things that involve some politics, or involve some serious violations, and touch the red line, will cause the warehouse itself to be blocked directly. This number is very small. Others, such as image beds, we will limit the disclosure, but the author of the warehouse can actually access it.
There is also a picture that has been passed on a lot. It is said that a person wrote a piece of code, and there is a function called saveDate, which will be regarded as "AV" violation information and will not be released. This has been confirmed with you many times, absolutely It's fake news! The author who posted this news has also apologized to us. This is purely his own joke for fun.
Regarding this audit event, as an old programmer who has been in the open source field for more than ten years, I would like to share some of my personal views for your reference only.
In the past decade or so, we have experienced a period of very rapid development of the Internet. In the past, we all obtained information from newspapers and TV, but now the Internet has become the only channel for us to obtain various information. From the articles we read in the early days, and then there were pictures, and now there are various short videos and long videos. But no matter what form of information, as long as it is public, it will be subject to audit supervision. When this kind of review is extended to code, we as programmers feel unacceptable at first, and I understand that sentiment very well.
On the other hand, open source has always advocated a concept of openness, freedom and collaboration. When this concept goes against the centralized auditing we have encountered, the voice of resistance will definitely be very strong. It's also one of the reasons why people have reacted so strongly to this.
The third point is that in recent years, we have noticed that the whole world is undergoing earth-shaking changes, including the impact of the epidemic, the relationship between China and the United States, and so on. At the same time, software technology is also experiencing rapid development, and various emerging technologies emerge one after another. But when we look back, open source itself has not changed much in the two or three decades since its birth. Including a variety of open source licenses, although there are some new licenses, they are essentially small changes based on traditional licenses such as Apache, and there are no earth-shaking changes.
This creates such a contradiction: the world is changing drastically, but the definition, rules, and concepts of open source have not changed much.
For a technology in 20 or 30 years, we can say that it is already a relatively old technology. So , whether open source, which is already in its 20s or 30s, can still adapt to the development and changes of the entire society today is a very big question mark in my head .
If it can adapt to changes in society, why has there been so much controversy about open source licenses in recent years? For example, the contradiction between cloud computing and open source software, such as some open source manufacturers changing open source agreements, such as the helpless audit constraints we encounter today, such as open source platforms will impose restrictions on some countries and regions and many more. Why are these problems with open source today?
If it cannot be adapted, then where should we change it to make open source more adaptable to the development of today's society?
In today's complex international situation, how should our open source develop? This is a question I want to throw to all open source enthusiasts. I don't have an answer myself. I think everyone can think about it together.
Of course, I think despite all kinds of problems, I still firmly believe that open source will get better and better, and it will get better and better in China.
Ma Yue: Just now I saw that the sweet potato may be about to fall into tears. In today's political and economic environment that is hard to come by in a century, in any case, it is the moment when we need the strongest national cohesion, and it is the moment when we need every developer to be united as never before.
The question that the sweet potato just mentioned is worth thinking about by each of us, how to build our local open source ecology together until it goes to the world. So looking at our sincerity to everyone over the past nine years, please tick two ticks for everyone who wants to share the code repository, take a minute to write your own readme, and we will definitely complete all of them as soon as possible. review.
At the same time, I also especially appeal to the vast number of developers to help us pass on positive energy, resist this kind of "one mouse feces ruins a pot of porridge" thing, and give everyone a pure code platform. Please understand, don't spread some negative emotions and cause something that I think is "the loved one hurts, the enemy is happy", really please.
Xu Yong: I think Open Source China should be the last Quixote in the field of code hosting. Our whole company is a Quixote, but I don’t want us to be a Quixote who is fighting with the windmill alone . Hope we have the support of the vast number of developers behind us.
There is a famous saying in the West called "If you want to wear a crown, you must bear the weight". Since Kaiyuan China has reached today, it has become a common spiritual home for everyone and an important national infrastructure. We have to shoulder our responsibilities. .
Today, we are facing an environment like the decoupling of technology between China and the United States. We do not know whether "science without borders" will still exist in the future, but I believe that our Chinese nation is a huge economy with a population of 1.4 billion in the world, and there are so many overseas. Chinese, we must be able to build a technological symbiosis of Confucian civilization. So under such a big background, I think each of us programmers needs a sense of mission, don't do things like "the loved ones hurt, the enemies are fast" as Ma Yue said, everyone should be responsible for their own code .
Where does Gitee go in the future?
Moderator: What is the future development plan of Gitee? Where should the future go?
Ma Yue: Our goal is to give everyone a complete "development cloud" and completely cloudize software engineering.
In the past, people may use more open source tools to mix and use, such as using Redmine for project management, GitLab for code management, Sonar for code quality, Jenkins for CI, Nexus for CD, etc. .
Open source China has come to this day and wants to give you an "All in One" solution. First of all, the entire Gitee is a software engineering development platform, including the code documentation we provide, and the testing functions that will be launched in the future. That is, to complete all the work from development, documentation, testing, and deployment on one platform, without jumping between different tools.
The second point is that in the future, we will put more emphasis on our openness, so we will have a plug-in market, and we will have an open API to ensure that whether it is from other big manufacturers, or any tools that are beneficial to developers can be easily connected. .
Third , we will definitely support Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Baidu Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and even overseas Azure, AWS, Google Cloud , etc.
All in all, the future direction of Gitee can be summarized as: "All clouds for all developers" - we provide all good cloud services for all programmers in the world. This is the future direction of Gitee - to create an All in One, open and integrated software engineering cloud platform.
Check the live broadcast details: https://gitee.com/activity/9th/