China is now pushing its local GitHub alternative, Gitee to be more followed by businesses and individual developers, thereby reducing the heavy reliance on American GitHub. The Gitee platform is backed by big institutions to take over GitHub, at least in China.
China is Preparing a GitHub Alternative for Chinese Community
Chinese technology firms are having a tough time since US sanctions, where the former is accused by the latter to be stealing original ideas and even spying on them. Huawei, the Chinese tech conglomerate, has taken the biggest hit till now, which has been suffering from reduced sales, blockage of chips, and critical Google apps and software. Considering this, the Chinese government has been pushing the local firms to become more self-reliant, to ditch US technology soon. In this pursuit, the Chinese government is pushing Gitee, a GitHub like a local repository for storing and sharing open-source codes among businesses and developers. Gitee is in existence for seven years, but Chinese developers are much reliant on GitHub due to its wide range. For example, a comparison is drawn between these two results GitHub standing at first, with a developer community of over 31 million with 100+ million repositories. Whereas the Gitee hub has over 5 million developers with 10+ million repositories. Yet, it’s backed by institutions like Huawei, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), research universities, and the Open Source China, a consortium behind Gitee. The biggest challenge for the Chinese government is to convince developers and businesses to host their source codes in native Gitee, rather than GitHub. This prepares the local businesses to be ready if the US directs GitHub to cut off from China, as it did with Iran and Syria recently.
