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Avoiding a Geopolitical Open Source Apocalypse

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2024-10-13 18:30:04

We’re so glad you’re here. You can expect all the best TNS content to arrive Monday through Friday to keep you on top of the news and at the top of your game.

Is a bifurcation of open source communities looming on the horizon? I recently attended a CNCF: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China Summit in Hong Kong, where Chinese speakers and presentations dominated. This is expected in Hong Kong, but perhaps most enlightening was the number of net-new open source projects being developed primarily out of China.

In recent years, China has increasingly become a center of gravity in the open source world. Chinese companies are also well-represented in major open source foundations such as OpenInfra and CNCF. Are we looking at a potential future rift in the open source world? Will there be an East and a West ecosystem that only touches occasionally? Or can we get past our differences for the common good?

China’s foray into open source might be marked by the advent of Red Flag Linux in 1999, but since then, there has been a proliferation of new open source projects from China. Chinese developers largely dominate these projects but seek to gain validation and create trust, usually by joining open source foundations.