GitCode, a git-hosting website operated Chongqing Open-Source Co-Creation Technology Co Ltd and with technical support from CSDN and Huawei Cloud.
It is being reported that many users’ repository are being cloned and re-hosted on GitCode without explicit authorization.
There is also a thread on Ycombinator (archived link)
Shame they don’t have anything themselves that’s worth the trouble to copy back.
Let’s dismiss all chinese contributors to open source projects with AI, javascript, PHP and so on.
Aren’t Alibaba and Huawei huge on opensource?
As China leap frogged west in solar and EV tech
I’ve seen what’s inside the speed controllers and battery monitoring circuitry for Chinese EVs. I don’t think I want to be anywhere near them.
That they got from the West when CATL bought out a bankrupt US company that had developed LFP to commercial viability.
I think the two of you are focusing on either end of this and not really seeing the bigger picture.
China absolutely (stole / acquired) all the technology they have for solar, EV, and grid based storage. They have literally innovated 0% in this particular industry. I don’t think there’s any debating this aspect.
At the same time, China has pour billions into domestic production of solar panels, lithium and sodium batteries, vehicle production, and grid based storage solutions the likes that no other country has even remotely attempted. They recent demonstrated cheap sodium based 10MWh storage systems that can be built using seawater sodium. Something that California makes a shit ton of in their desalination plants, that they currently just shove the salt off as waste byproduct.
Like, if we wanted to, that kind of thing that China just demonstrated, we could be building GWh level storage systems for 10% the cost of a 1 GWh nuclear facility strictly off a byproduct that California distinctly doesn’t want and is literally paying people to take away. They could literally flip a cost into a revenue stream, but we don’t because “reasons”. We could literally have large batteries charged in Utah, and then use rail to move the sodium based batteries into the Eastern sections of the US, using literally the same infrastructure that we use today to move the tons of coal we move around for the TWh of power we generate. We could be doing this today. But we don’t because many nations just buy the arguments politicians feed them, or “it’s complicated”. And then there’s China demonstrating at small scale that it’s doable. So instead we say “oh well it wouldn’t scale” or “oh well you stole all that tech” because apparently our pride is more important than climate change.
The thing is, yes China has not committed to educating their population into novel development of these technologies. But at the same time they are deploying this stuff at rates every other developed nation has said they’d like to try and do that one day off in the future. Or can’t do right now because their hands are tied.
For the folks pointing at China as the enemy, fine. I’m not going to debate it. But there’s still things to learn from what they are doing with that stolen technology. Do we need to cozy up to them? Nah. But they’re showing off that grid based storage at scale and cheap is a thing even though people like France and the US say that such a thing is not possible at this time. They are showing LFP is viable if you’re willing to take an initial domestic loss to invest in the infrastructure, something the US citizens know but keep saying “well oil interest are holding us back”. No, there’s only a few dozen oil execs, there over a three hundred million non-oil execs. It’s a lack of will power.
Like most western nations keep coming up with excuses for delaying EV and green technology pushes and China keeps showing many of the excuses given to be false. And we know they’re false. We know the expectation of no less than $36k USD for an EV is some bullshit that car companies are pulling to offset all the baggage they have from leaving ICE. We know we could have charge stations every 100 miles on the Interstates, but we don’t because oil companies don’t want to lose their investments in the infrastructure they’ve got right now.
We know the reasons being given by our political and industry leaders are all bullshit. China is over there showing IRL how bullshit they are. Yeah, they stole everything they have, but at the same time all this “oh we couldn’t possibly do that here in the US” is shown for the BS it is, that we already know it to be, in China.
I mean, great, we’re all very smart people. Awesome. What good is that awesome smartness if we keep letting dumb fucks in politics pander off dumb excuses for why we don’t get to enjoy any of the stuff that awesome smartness provides? What good is being innovative if corporations keep handicapping that innovation to ensure they have a steady stream of revenue?
I mean yeah, let’s call China out of the bullshit they pull. But I mean, let’s not forget all the damn windows we’ve broken ourselves in our glass house here.
Why move the batteries instead of “moving” the electrons? You generate the electricity anywhere you want and use Therese nice cables that happen to be everywhere.
Just my take but:
Like them or not (and IMV they are a serious threat), China’s system enforces a strategic view, long term, more like a 100yr plan.
We don’t. It’s by election cycle or quarterly earnings report.
These things all make more sense if you see them impassionately, and without an ethical filter, from a long term POV.
China will do what’s best for China in the long term. Irrespective of ‘politics’ that are like ripples upon a rising tide.
I absolutely do not discredit the scaling they’ve done in the manufacturing process, but if there’s one thing China does well, it’s scale manufacturing. That’s usually because they have much lower safety and quality standards, and might bring them up later on. But what they don’t seem to have, at least in these industries, is innovation in the underlying technology to any appreciable extent.
But hooboy, can they pump out solar panels and batteries when they’re taken off the leash.
And abso-fucking-lutely, we in Western countries continuously shoot ourselves in the foot with short-term thinking. There was a time it seemed when there were plans like the New Deal where thought was given to decades down the road. Today, the longest term outlook you see if 4 years. And that’s common across the board, I wouldn’t even place that just at the feet of the US. It’s a damn shame, and it’s the reason the middle class is getting hammered for the last 40 years. But we do know how to R&D, just now we can’t get build a manufacturing base without some grifter taking all the subsidies and shipping them offshore.
Now I’m depressed.
That’s called value investing… Maybe our dear leader should learn how to manage national wealth instead of cutting companies and allowing a geopolitical adversary to take over tech/IP
Ie this is not a flex you think it is, it just proves my point that our dear leaders are incompetent imbiciles or worst… Bad faith actors.
No accountability leads to this sort of decision making lol
Bad faith, for sure, made very clear in the last 20 years.
This is inevitable:
Once the people in China can only see the CCP’s version of everything,
& ALL stuff has been adulterated, either by AI or by some agency-or-other,
THEN dissent should die-down in the Chinese population:
Read Lanier’s “Foreign to Familiar” to understand how Tropical-Culture vs Nordic-Culture shapes people, & how old-cultures vs new-cultures shape people,
then read Hofstede’s “Exploring Culture” to understand the dimensions of culture that his Cultural Dimensions Theory digs into ( power-distance, uncertainty-avoidance, “success”-orientation, & other dimensions )…
& when you understand how we’re kind of “template” people, before being born into culture,
but once born into it, our entire meaning gets framed within whatever culture we were born into…
therefore, the CCP can simply remove most diversity-of-meaning from their completely-possessed-population, through a generation or 2 of that.
Tibetan, Uyghur, Hongkonger, Taiwanese, Indian, South-Korean, Japanese, the intent is consistent: "the destruction of " … others … “is the midwife of Chinese supremacy”.
I expect a similar kind of program to exist in all right-possessed countries, as the right is doing in the US, right now, with burning or banning books, eradicating proper education, suppressing libraries, etc, they’re just doing the same thing as what the CCP’s doing, only less-skillfully, is all.
No real difference in their deeper heart/motivation/intent, though: supremacism, crushing/destroying all “other” kinds.
Russia’s big on it, too, isn’t it?
Islamism…
The “Crusades” were good examples of this kind of idiocy?
The “Inquisition”?
The “Buddhist” genociding of Tamils?
So long as the “home” story is … “coherent”, & “justifies” all, then … kids grow up … believing, right?
There’s a book, & a Big Think yt video, on “Collective Illusions”, which is important!
Please invest in seeing that video, & see how it’s actually a delusion-mechanism in our minds…
…used by political-forces, yes, but they couldn’t use it if it didn’t exist, could they?
_ /\ _
China cares of nothing, from patents to licences. Culture of steal and copy, rebrand and sell/use
I would argue that this culture would possibly be good to learn from them, first. It didn’t come to existence as some kind of social evolution, but was impressed by power.
Second, at least they are behind Europeans in the culture of genocide.
Learn from stealing ane copying ? Meh.
Second is completely unrelated (but also false btw)
When they mirror it, does they uses a different username? If so I’m totally fine as that’s just a fork, otherwise it should count as stolen. Not the project but the name and reputation of the owner.
They can use the same name but if the owner signs their commits we can at least spot the fake commits.
And even if they clone all repos they don’t clone the build systems, so their builds of apps and windows installers will be signed with different keys.
For people who follow guides to clone something from a repo, compile it and install it, they need to be on their guard if the repo URL is not the official one.
Free backups.
Yeah, why not. They are not cloning developers, yet. :)
Put content that is illegal in China into your code, problem solved!
deleted by creator
AbstractBaseWinnieThePoohFactory
The phrase Tiananmen Square massacre in each file.
Actually that happened 😂 they accidentally “mirrored” some activists’ repository and got blocked temporarily
Preparation for war.
Lmao the murican propaganda worked wonders on this guy
and the Chinese propoganda worked on 2 websites.
Yeah… The main thing I see here is that China (read; government , not the people, not being racist here) will take this code, they will make improvements on it, they will NOT give back. Basically like Microsoft, but now an entire country.
Chinese government hasn’t exact had a good reputation when it comes to taking technology and not giving anything back
Not like I’d want contributions from the chinese state programmers.
Feels like an easy entry for state level supply chain attack.
Quick, someone tell Nintendo!
that could come in veery handy once microsoft wants to pull some plugs. i guess we can be grateful for the backup that is 1. not 100% in m$ hands any more then and 2nd cannot be as easy destroyed as some backups at archive.org. i actually hoped for someone with enough money to create this type of security after m$ assimilated github and thought like “does nobody see the rising danger there?” but even if china’s great fork might be more reliable than m$ over time, maybe it’s better to have your own backups of all the things you actually may need in future.
btw did microsoft manage to get rid of the hackers that settled into their network for … how long??
i guess they’ll tell
Some random Chinese company: does something jenky
Blogger: “The entirety of China is doing this jenky thing!”
All Chinese companies are the CCP. That’s how the system works.
And all US companies follow US laws and crazy people say they do the bidding of CIA/NSA/FBI- which they do, to a degree.
Yea they would have to do their bidding if the government came knocking with subpoenas.
Funny how you say something similar and we have such different karma for it.
Might be because of our approaches?
Your’s comes across as a sort of whatabout that nobody asked for and mine is just a statement of fact related to what you mentioned.
It’s not inaccurate to say that the Chinese government has a tighter leash on all business in their country than the US has in theirs though.
And they have been!
The random Chinese company: owned by Huawei and CSDN (where CSDN is known to be the worst site known to Chinese developers where they literally costs money to let you download open source code)
JIAN YANG!!!
Ehrlich Bachman, this is your mom and you, you are not my baby.
you’re a fat, and a poor
I burn the garbage
If we steal IP from China does the America government give us a business loan?
China has no IP
Bs
I love how this image is a pun
I’m not getting it. Explain, please?
IP Man. Great movies.
Ahh, thanks. I think that may be a grandad level pun
The vast majority of projects on GitHub is open-source and forkable, why would that need authorization?
It’s… suspicious that China’s doing it en masse, but there’s nothing wrong in cloning or forking a repo last i heard.
Open source? Or open source with a non-commercial restriction?
Why would that matter? You can fork such projects too.
Seems easier to commercialize a mirrored site?
It’s not about authorization. They want to build a knowledge base for when the Great Firewall gets some more filters. Just like russias mirror of wikipedia which is heavily edited to discredit the west.
Just like russias mirror of wikipedia which is heavily edited to discredit the west.
How come I live in Russia and have never seen such?
I know only of quite a few troll\counterculture projects, some, like Lurkmore, are already, well, dead, some, like Traditsiya, are not.
That, of course, if you don’t mean that Russian Wikipedia in itself has problems. Which would be true.
It’s called Ruwiki.
It was launched in June 24, 2023 as a fork of the Russian Wikipedia, and has been described by some media groups as “Putin-friendly” and “Kremlin-compliant”.
OK. Well, not sure anyone really uses that.
And under copyleft licensing, they’re allowed to do that. Both to GitHub repositories and Wikipedia.
Hopefully they follow the rest of the stipulations of the licenses, such as the common one about keeping the license as such and contributing the changes back.
Of course they are, it’s not like there is some kind of international jurisdiction anyway. What is bothersome is why they do it.
Even if there was jurisdiction, anyone in the world is entitled to do it by the very licenses these works are released under.
This seems like the most plausible explanation. Only other thing I can think of is they want to develop their own CoPilot (which I’m guessing isn’t available in China due to the U.S. AI restrictions?), and they’re just using their existing infrastructure to gather training data.
Firewalls are already being built in america’s internet with the ban of tiktok
As an european i do not see problem with having copies of free software in places not controlled by the monopoly microsoft is morphing to.
