This article reflects information as of 2020. For the latest details, please contact us.
Other
GitHub in China
2020.10.13
This article reflects information as of 2020. For the latest details, please contact us.
This article is about 1,338 characters long and takes about 3 minutes to read. Written by: Qian Yunwen, Director / PR, tentus inc.
Hello, everyone! Good evening!
Ever since I changed careers into the web industry, there's always something new to discover. Today, while hunting for a note topic, I got curious about GitHub in China and looked into it — and thought, "Ah, I see!"
What is GitHub?
I doubt anyone reading our note doesn't know GitHub, but to sum it up simply: GitHub is a software-development platform and also a place to host source code.
In other words, it's a web service where you can store, manage, and publish program code, design data, projects, and more. In effect it might be a bit like an image-collection web service such as Pinterest — except with GitHub it's data rather than images.
Can you access GitHub from China?
In China, due to government regulation, services and platforms such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, tumblr, and Instagram cannot be used at all. However, when I looked into it, GitHub is apparently available in China.
Also, according to statistics from "InfoQ," a specialized media outlet dedicated to software development, when GitHub's enterprise accounts were surveyed as of March 2019, it was found to be widely used even by Chinese IT giants such as Alibaba (the largest online retailer), Baidu (the largest internet search company), Tencent (a major internet-services company), and Huawei (a major telecommunications-equipment company).
Is GitHub setting up a Chinese subsidiary?
According to the "Octoverse Annual Report" that GitHub published in November 2019, China's use of open-source code is growing the fastest in the world outside the United States, and the source code contributed by Chinese users apparently accounts for 31% of all of Asia.
China's number of GitHub users is the world's second largest after the United States (from https://octoverse.github.com/ )
For that reason, GitHub likely can't afford to let go of the Chinese market.
China's homegrown GitHub alternative, "Gitee"
In June 2019, GitHub was acquired by Microsoft of the United States. GitHub bills itself as a borderless open-source platform, but the reality was different.
For example, in July 2019, it was revealed by an Iranian developer that GitHub had, without warning, been blocking all Iranian accounts, and had also locked the accounts of developers in Iraq, Cuba, Crimea, and elsewhere.
With service liable to be interrupted at any time, Chinese companies had until now relied on foreign technology… Amid this, Gitee, now seven years since its founding, has begun an effort in China to localize companies' source code.
According to Gitee, it currently hosts over 10 million open-source repositories and has served more than 5 million developers to date.
References
https://www.sejuku.net/blog/7901
https://jp.techcrunch.com/2020/08/22/2020-08-21-china-is-building-its-github-alternative-gitee/