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Title: Why China is Giving Away Its Tech For Free

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/17/2123...

An anonymous reader shares a report: [...] the rise in China of open
technology, which relies on transparency and decentralisation, is awkward for
an authoritarian state. If the party's patience with open-source fades, and
it decides to exert control, that could hinder both the course of innovation
at home, and developers' ability to export their technology abroad. China's
open-source movement first gained traction in the mid-2010s. Richard Lin, co-
founder of Kaiyuanshe, a local open-source advocacy group, recalls that most
of the early adopters were developers who simply wanted free software. That
changed when they realised that contributing to open-source projects could
improve their job prospects. Big firms soon followed, with companies like
Huawei backing open-source work to attract talent and cut costs by sharing
technology. Momentum gathered in 2019 when Huawei was, in effect, barred by
America from using Android. That gave new urgency to efforts to cut reliance
on Western technology. Open-source offered a faster way for Chinese tech
firms to take existing code and build their own programs with help from the
country's vast community of developers. In 2020 Huawei launched OpenHarmony,
a family of open-source operating systems for smartphones and other devices.
It also joined others, including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, to establish the
OpenAtom Foundation, a body dedicated to open-source development. China
quickly became not just a big contributor to open-source programs, but also
an early adopter of software. JD.com, an e-commerce firm, was among the first
to deploy Kubernetes. AI has lately given China's open-source movement a
further boost. Chinese companies, and the government, see open models as the
quickest way to narrow the gap with America. DeepSeek's models have generated
the most interest, but Qwen, developed by Alibaba, is also highly rated, and
Baidu has said it will soon open up the model behind its Ernie chatbot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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