Chinese OS and software ecosystem

vincent

vincent

Grumpy Old Man
Staff member
Moderator - World Affairs
SanWenYu said:
It has happened already.

The US still has laws to ban export of certain encryption algorithms, open source implementations included, to sanctioned countries such as Iran, NK, Cuba, etc.

After all, open source projects hosted in the west are still subject to the local laws. The authorities have many ways to keep sanctioned entities from accessing the code repositories of open source projects.

Russians became the latest victims after the war in Ukraine broke out. Github, for example, deleted (some?) repositories owned by Russians without warning. Gitlab then announced to stop hiring citizens of Russia, China (and perhaps Iran?).

Open source projects are run by human beings. Human beings have different politic views.

The majority of the open source contributors are social justice warriors and anti-establishment on many issues. But some of them can still side with the mainstream narratives sometimes. For example, we have the story in which project of notepad++, a quite popular editor on Windows, labelled a release specifically to support the rioters in HK. I have seen in a few instances where people in the Rust and Debian communities pushing to shut the doors for Huawei and Loongson only because these Chinese companies are sanctioned by the US government.
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Pointless moves. Open Source literally mean the source codes are open to all to view and use. Their licenses generally allow forking, with the caveat the forks need to be open source as well.
Neither the US government nor the project owners can prevent anyone from pulling copies of the source codes off Github and store them on Gitee (perfectly legal by the way)
 
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tokenanalyst

Brigadier
Registered Member
SanWenYu said:
It has happened already.

The US still has laws to ban export of certain encryption algorithms, open source implementations included, to sanctioned countries such as Iran, NK, Cuba, etc.

After all, open source projects hosted in the west are still subject to the local laws. The authorities have many ways to keep sanctioned entities from accessing the code repositories of open source projects.

Russians became the latest victims after the war in Ukraine broke out. Github, for example, deleted (some?) repositories owned by Russians without warning. Gitlab then announced to stop hiring citizens of Russia, China (and perhaps Iran?).

Open source projects are run by human beings. Human beings have different politic views.

The majority of the open source contributors are social justice warriors and anti-establishment on many issues. But some of them can still side with the mainstream narratives sometimes. For example, we have the story in which project of notepad++, a quite popular editor on Windows, labelled a release specifically to support the rioters in HK. I have seen in a few instances where people in the Rust and Debian communities pushing to shut the doors for Huawei and Loongson only because these Chinese companies are sanctioned by the US government.
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You can delete, restrict, shutdown whatever you want but once something is the public domain is game over, that why ITARs laws don't even bother. There is nothing stopping Huawei and Loongson from forking the project and releasing their own versions, what is going to stop a Chinese programmer from launching their own version of notepad++ without the HK thing, but there is a way to put a stop to it, closing the project.
 
vincent

vincent

Grumpy Old Man
Staff member
Moderator - World Affairs
tokenanalyst said:
You can delete, restrict, shutdown whatever you want but once something is the public domain is game over, that why ITARs laws don't even bother. There is nothing stopping Huawei and Loongson from forking the project and releasing their own versions, what is going to stop a Chinese programmer from launching their own version of notepad++ without the HK thing, but there is a way to put a stop to it, closing the project.
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Not really. People can still take the codes, start a new project on Gitee and continue development on the fork.
 
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SanWenYu

Captain
Registered Member
vincent said:
Pointless moves. Open Source literally mean the source codes are open to all to view and use. Their licenses generally allow forking, with the caveat the forks need to be open source as well.
Neither the US government nor the project owners can prevent anyone from pulling copies of the source codes off Github and store them on Gitee (perfectly legal by the way)
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Not saying it is as effective as the western authorities want but it still makes it harder for sanctioned entities to use the open source software.

Open source is not about the source only which is usually not enough to reliably reproducce the software. Not mention that once you lose the access to the project, you are on your own even if you fork it.

It is the like with hardware, having the blueprints does not necessarily enables one to reverse engineer and reproduce it 100%. There are uncodified know-hows in engineering.

Another case is the semiconductor tools. The US sanctions are not to take away what the Chinese fabs already have (we know the Americans would wish to achieve that, too). The goal of those sanctions is to keep China from getting the newer and better models down the road.
 
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supersnoop

Major
Registered Member
tphuang said:
i don't think they can ban China's participation in RISC-V, but rather American firms from working with Chinese firms in RISC-V, which in effect would either sink RISC-V or make RISC-V completely off limit to American tech firms, since Chinese firms are more than half of the RISC-V market
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Problem for them is that American companies are already investing in RISC-V. Western Digital already has a RISC-V SSD controller, tenstorrent (technically Canadian, but we know Canada is just a US colony) has some AI-focused CPUs, Google is porting Android, SiFive has commercial chips etc.

At best you can limit cooperation as you said, but that's about it. Otherwise you can try to create an absurd semi-closed "Freedom-V" ISA where only approved companies have access, but that sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare that no one would want to touch.

caudaceus said:
Lmaoo they gonna target Open Source movement soon.

"You just committed a patch to Linux kernel? NOOOO you just helped see see pee!!!!"
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You know how I know you didn't read through the article?
“I fear that our export-control laws are not equipped to deal with the challenge of open-source software - whether in advanced semiconductor designs like RISC-V or in the area of AI - and a dramatic paradigm shift is needed,” Warner said in a statement to Reuters.
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No surprise they would target open source anything, it's literal Communism.

But what they are saying is retarded. That is the whole point of open-source, so the US government, or private companies, or even individuals can't dictate what happens to the code. Are you going to ban OSS altogether?

SanWenYu said:
Not saying it is as effective as the western authorities want but it still makes it harder for sanctioned entities to use the open source software.

Open source is not about the source only which is usually not enough to reliably reproducce the software. Not mention that once you lose the access to the project, you are on your own even if you fork it.

It is the like with hardware, having the blueprints does not necessarily enables one to reverse engineer and reproduce it 100%. There are uncodified know-hows in engineering.
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China at this point has enough devs to sustain their own OSS projects/forks. ie. tengine as fork of nginx
Also, how can you close off access to the original anyway? It's like the guy in the article said, it'd be like closing people from working on the internet.
 
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SanWenYu

Captain
Registered Member
tokenanalyst said:
Open source projects are forked all the time and sometimes the forked version are better than the original version.
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True but that's not the norm as far as I can tell. I would even call it rare.

I am not glorifying the effectiveness of weaponizing open source. Just pointing out it's happening. At the same time, we also need to keep in mind that having source code alone is not sufficient in software engineering.
 
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gelgoog

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
The RISC-V Foundation was moved to Switzerland and renamed to RISC-V International precisely because of possible attempts by the US to use sanctions to prevent other countries from using the specification. Namely China in particular, but there are also other countries corporations present in RISC-V International under US sanctions, for example Russian companies.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

As you will notice Huawei is in the list and is even a Premier Member.
 
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SanWenYu

Captain
Registered Member
supersnoop said:
China at this point has enough devs to sustain their own OSS projects/forks. ie. tengine as fork of nginx
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Yes you can fork it if you can carry it forward on your own and improve it further for your own needs. This happens and there are success stories of this approach.

But no all sanctioned entities have the required capabilities and capacities.

As I said in other posts already, that's not even the main point of such sanctions.

supersnoop said:
Also, how can you close off access to the original anyway? It's like the guy in the article said, it'd be like closing people from working on the internet.
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Everyone knows that no ban works like a perfect valve without any leak. There will always be ways to "work around" bans. But authorities everywhere still instate bans here and there.
 
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tokenanalyst

Brigadier
Registered Member
SanWenYu said:
True but that's not the norm as far as I can tell. I would even call it rare.

I am not glorifying the effectiveness of weaponizing open source. Just pointing out it's happening. At the same time, we also need to keep in mind that having source code alone is not sufficient in software engineering.
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How many versions we have of the BSD OS, how many linux distros,LibreOffice, MariaDB and so on? in open source, forking is more common that you can imagine, is one of the strength of open source, allowing some projects to survive.
 
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