When it comes to open source in China, what do you think of?
"Followers, not creators", "Once you open source abroad, you will be independent at home", "nobody in the global open source community"... If you take these "stereotypes" and participate in domestic open source activities in the past two years, it will be extremely difficult. It is likely that there will be no small shock.
Chinese software practitioners, enterprises, and developers have never stopped running, using bit by bit contributions to refresh the presence of China's open source power in the global open source ecosystem.
It can be said with certainty that today's open source in China is different from the past.
There is a set of data like this. The use of open source technology by Chinese companies has become the mainstream. Chinese developers contribute more than 40% of the source code. There are more than 100 million global developers on GitHub, including more than 10 million Chinese developers, ranking second in the world. bit.
For Chinese software developers, open source has long been an unfamiliar term, and industry acceptance, talent reserves, and open source awareness are particularly abundant. But at the same time, how to give full play to the value of open source and obtain greater returns is still a question that many people feel a little confused about.
This stage reminds me of the historical period of the "new generation".
65 million years ago, after the fifth cataclysm, the Earth's Mesozoic Era ended and the Cenozoic Era began. Life on Earth tried to rebuild a stable and prosperous biosphere, and the entire planet began to take on a new look. The Cenozoic Era did not reach its peak at the beginning. As the climate gradually became cooler and more suitable, large areas were covered by grasslands, allowing new life forms to evolve continuously, filling ecological niches, and eventually allowing the Cenozoic Era to flourish.
China's open source business has also entered a new stage. The next urgent task is to further cultivate a climate environment suitable for open source, so that technological applications can develop rapidly due to evolution, and stimulate China's innovation vitality.
What kind of climate and environment does the prosperous "new generation" need? We can feel it from the rain or shine of China's open source.
Looking at the sky: the new atmosphere of China's open source
The concept and history of open source have been repeatedly popularized in recent years. In a word: open source is a software development model that originates from idealism (free and open collaboration), is vigorously driven by commercialization, and gathers the wisdom of groups.
After more than 50 years of development, the innovation potential and industrial influence of open source have become a global consensus. In almost every monopoly software field, there will be a corresponding open source version as the source of open innovation.
China's open source business, after years of gestation, has also started from chaos and ushered in a vast clear sky.
The first stage: the beginning of the world, the concept recognition period, the use of open source.
In the long years from the 1970s to around 2010, open source has grown from the idea of "free software" to the maturity of its business model. Large enterprises have begun to realize the value of open source and actively invest in it. There are a large number of commercial success stories such as Hat and GitHub. At this stage, there are very few open source developers in China, and most of them join international open source communities and projects in the form of individual participation, widely use open source software, and mostly take the role of learners and followers.
The second stage: the sky is shining, contribute to the production period, and contribute to open source.
After 2010, with the rapid development of the Internet, the "open source paradigm" oriented to the Internet environment based on collaboration has grown rapidly in China. important contribution. In 2017, the scale of Chinese developers on Github jumped to the third place in the world.
The third stage: clear sky, industry cultivation period, leading open source.
Since 2020, the digital economy has advanced rapidly in China, and the development of open source has also been particularly rapid, attracting multiple forces to build.
Policy traction, the government issued policies to support the development of open source.
Embracing by enterprises, Chinese enterprises of different sizes have begun to embrace open source strategies. The big ones include Huawei, Alibaba, and Tencent, and the small ones include various software development companies and vertical cloud service providers. They participate in the International Open Source Foundation and contribute large-scale open source projects. , began to open source the underlying basic software such as databases, operating systems, and development tools. At the beginning of the project, it began to consider donating to CNCF, the Apa Foundation, etc., forming a three-dimensional industrial echelon.
Social consensus, open source is no longer limited to the value of free software and commercial value, but has begun to release the social value of "innovation source power", attracting all parties to invest in and donate to open source, and a large amount of social resources pour in. Thanks to multiple joint forces, China's open source industry is particularly prosperous, and Chinese faces have begun to play a more important role in various open source foundations.
Judging from the current situation, China's open source has gone through the prehistoric years, and finally opened up a vast industrial world, ushering in a clear sky.
So, is the rapid development in the past three to five years a moment of luck? From another perspective, is the foundation for the rise of China's open source real and stable? Can it support the rapid growth of the industry in the future?
The answer is: yes.
The rise of open source in China is supported by four cornerstones:
First, the digital market demand.
Wang Huaimin, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, believes that the top-down engineering paradigm is more suitable for deterministic innovation and facing clear users, which can meet the time and cost control requirements of software development; while uncertain innovation requires bottom-up The open source paradigm of , through the emergence of crowd intelligence to create source code.
(Live speech by Wang Huaimin, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Nowadays, all industries need to be able to deeply integrate digital technology. There are many blank areas and new technologies. The development mode of traditional software engineering is dominated by a certain enterprise, which is difficult to fully explore. It must be "reported to keep warm" through open source , use the wisdom of the group to explore better software technology that is more in line with the needs of the times.
Second, the necessity of software casting the soul.
In the digital age, "software defines everything", international open source agreements need to have unpredictable potential risks, and it has become extremely urgent to keep the "soul" of software in the digital world on China's open source platforms. More developers and participants began to explore localized business opportunities, injecting development momentum into China's open source ecosystem.
At the same time, Chinese companies are also completing key links such as basic software. In the past, Chinese companies participated in open source, mostly upper-level application projects. Now they are starting to do more difficult things such as underlying databases and operating systems. This has also played a role in the domestic software industry. supporting role.
Third, the maturity of open source industrialization.
Open source must have the cornerstone of industrialization to form commercial returns. Emerging technologies such as cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain have produced a large number of advanced solutions in China, which have been contributed to the open source community, or directly open sourced, making open source a new market driver for China's software service industry point. We once interviewed an investor who said that if ToB entrepreneurial projects in the software field are still done in a closed-source manner, almost no companies are willing to invest. It can be said that open source is showing clear commercial value, giving developers more reasons to join open source and reap success.
Fourth, there is a large supply of open source talents.
A large number of open source positions in foreign companies and domestic companies have cultivated a group of open source talents, and the number of open source developers is growing rapidly. The younger generation of developers in China has a global vision and communication skills, and they have begun to actively integrate into global collaborations such as Github and participate in open source projects.
Looking back on the road, we will find that China's open source is developed on the basis of global open source predecessors and high technology, using global open source wisdom to make itself better, and then feed innovation back to the world.
Looking forward, open source is the cornerstone of China's digital economy, driving the further prosperity of the domestic software industry, and the next journey will be bright.
Rain watching the road
New generation, new stage, new problems
Entering the new generation, when all things will prosper, primates are awakened, and the industry is thriving, will China's open source be a smooth road in the future, without haze and hidden worries?
The heyday of the Cenozoic Era did not happen overnight, but under the premise of suitable climatic conditions, new life could continue to evolve. From this perspective, the rapid development of open source in China still has some preconditions, which are insufficient:
First of all, there are too many low-level reinvented wheels, and too few competitive new technological species.
A tropical rainforest cannot be full of small species such as rabbits and hummingbirds, but also "big creatures" such as eagles, elephants, and rhinos. At present, there are many low-level "reinvented wheels" in domestic open source, and there are too many low-level repetitions. A large number of open source projects are concentrated in upper layers such as application software. Among the projects hosted by the open source software publishing platform SourceForge, 66% have not been downloaded or used, and there are very few open source software that continue to receive attention. There are still not enough basic software, underlying innovations and open source projects that truly have application value and competitiveness.
Second, there is more than "credibility" but not enough "creation".
Opportunities for domestic open source software are largely concentrated in localized substitution and "Xinchuang". The independent credibility of China's open source software is naturally extremely high, but more attention is paid to reaching the same international level. In terms of creativity and innovation, in order to achieve "what others don't have, what others have" requires further gathering of strength , Make efforts to root technology and meta-innovation.
In addition, the road to open source is clear, but the road to business is blurred.
Mastering open source will definitely lead to better development and greater business space? Not necessarily.
The founder of a domestic software company once told me that they provide overseas SaaS services and are not familiar with the local area. Developing based on the source code of some influential open source projects can quickly open up popularity and understand the developer's perspective. Get used to it, let customers accept it faster, and accelerate commercialization. However, open source is not a talisman for commercialization. You may not be able to make money if you open source. The essence of an enterprise is to make good software and services, and there are many branches of open source projects. The release, follow-up, and iteration of various versions are also important for enterprises. cost. In order to truly release the industrial value of open source and achieve commercialization, it is not enough to simply open source code. Product polishing, commercial resource docking, software update iterations, etc. need longer cycle and refined support.
Another very critical issue is that there are a large number of software engineers in China, but the number of new talents is insufficient.
Perhaps many friends think that there are millions of software engineers in China, and there should be no shortage of open source talents, but it is not the case.
On the one hand, the concept of open source has been around for more than 50 years, and the activeness of open source in China is only in the past three to five years. Therefore, the awareness of open source, the degree of trust in collaboration, and the threshold of participation channels need to be further optimized. We have contacted many zero-based AI developers, or other industry practitioners, who have never heard of the open source community at the beginning, and do not know where to start learning.
On the other hand, the combination of emerging technologies and industries has changed the traditional relationship between supply and demand of talents, and the gap for new talents has been rapidly widened. Today, software engineers not only need to have programming skills, but also take creativity as the core of workplace competitiveness and understand enterprise needs and business scenarios. The cultivation of creativity and the combination of technology and application scenarios are great challenges to traditional education.
The above-mentioned problems and challenges may be just some aspects and microcosms of China's open source in the new stage. To deal with these problems and challenges, it is not only necessary to break through specific problems one by one, but to participate in all roles of government, industry, academia, research and application, and create An overall climate and innovation atmosphere suitable for China's open source prosperity.
Rain or shine is pleasing to the eye, even if the journey is far
In any case, after going through the process of learning open source-using open source-contributing to open source-leading open source, China's open source business is getting better and better, and the direction of progress cannot be reversed. Then, the next step is to accelerate the creation of a suitable climate, so that the "new generation" of open source ecology can flourish and evolve new species one after another.
There are many things that a prosperous ecology can do. Here we want to emphasize one of the most core infrastructures—an open source platform.
Reinventing the wheel, lack of heavy innovation, unclear commercialization of open source, lack of talents... The root of these problems is the lack of a platform that can bring together forces from all walks of life in government, industry, academia, and research, and concentrate on doing what should be done well. to the extreme.
When China's open source development reaches a high level, there must be an open source platform with world influence.
Such a platform needs to have several characteristics:
1. Open, open, and more open. An open source veteran said that if domestic open source platforms want to grow bigger, they should make the structure bigger and make the openness more extreme, so that developers have no worries and can come and go freely. Enterprises are the new force of open source. At present, Chinese enterprises are playing their own game, and mutual cooperation is not enough. Only with a broader and open mind can the ecology be built.
2. It is technically good enough. Leading open source also requires professional capabilities, and requires Chinese companies to do well enough in technology, continue to innovate, and bring high-quality and efficient contributions to open source platforms. Especially in cloud computing, AI and other fields, with the help of open source rapid iteration, to meet the technical needs of the international and mainstream technology market, the open source platform is rooted in China, and in the future can be global, attracting international developers to China to make contributions.
3. Community friendliness. A senior software developer told me: "What is good software? Software with a lively community after open source is good software." For developers, a low learning threshold and smooth and easy-to-use development tools are required in the early stage. , powerful community resources and an efficient feedback discussion environment to help developers get started quickly. At the commercialization stage, it is necessary to face customers, understand needs, sort out pain points, and define products. This process forces open source developers to deal with customers. The participation of enterprises in the community can help developers adapt to the market faster, connect resources, and complete commercial transformation.
China's open source has crossed the first cycle. It is no longer a question of whether or not. It has begun to take on a new look and needs to start answering higher-order questions: how many projects are there, what is the quality of the code, and how much influence is there...
Looking back, there has always been a bleak place, neither wind nor rain. Regardless of whether it is sunny or rainy, China's open source has never stopped, step by step, and finally reached the new generation.
On the open source stage of the digital age, Chinese faces have already stood under the spotlight.
