GitHub keen to open subsidiary in China
Beijing wants Chinese developers to engage more with open-source software, says executive
by Yuan YangGitHub, the world’s biggest software development platform, is looking to open a subsidiary in China, as the Chinese government tries to protect its access to key technology from further US sanctions.
Erica Brescia, GitHub’s chief operating officer, said in an interview with the Financial Times that Beijing was “very encouraging” of the company’s plans to expand in China.
GitHub, which was bought for $7.5bn last year by Microsoft, hosts and manages software development for private companies and is the biggest host of open-source software projects that anyone can take part in.
Ms Brescia said the company was planning a “phased approach”, first looking into setting up a wholly foreign-owned subsidiary in China for the purposes of hiring staff, starting with a general manager. After that, the company might explore joint ventures and the possibility of hosting GitHub content in China.
Chinese developers are concerned that they could lose access to GitHub if Washington extends its export sanctions. Some point to the decision taken by GitHub in July to restrict accounts of users in some US-sanctioned countries, such as Cuba and Iran, as a foreboding of what could happen to them. The company has said it would lobby US regulators to prevent the expansion of export controls.
Ms Brescia said the Chinese government was keen for domestic developers to engage more with open-source software to hedge against the risk of being cut off from US-developed software as trade tensions continue. Since open-source software is publicly and freely available for us, it is exempt from US sanctions.
Without GitHub, Chinese companies would lose access to the code of open-source software, leaving their programs stuck in the past.
Some open-source software is critical to the internet; Apache’s open-source web server software, for example, is used to run one-third of all websites, and its development is supported by a US-based foundation.
“What [government ministries] told us is, they believe that open-source is a great way to build on the innovation of others, but obviously it gives more of a sense of security because it’s not subject to any trade restrictions in the US,” Ms Brescia said on the sidelines of the company’s first community event in Beijing.
“I think there has been a strategic push in China around open-source in general because it gives you a way to connect with the rest of the development world, without building on proprietary technologies,” she said, adding that the company had met officials from the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which regulates the telecoms industry, as well as the Ministry of Public Security, which runs the police force.
While other foreign tech companies have found their platforms blocked from Chinese users, GitHub has remained accessible. Earlier this year Chinese developers took advantage of the platform’s lack of censorship to organise a workers’ rights campaign against long hours which is still hosted on the platform.
The company publicly posts government takedown notices, saying it does so “to document their potential to chill speech”.
So far such notices have come from Spain, Russia and China. All five notices from China received this year were requests from the MPS to take down content related to Falun Gong, a religious group that has been harshly repressed in China.
Ms Brescia admitted that the company faced a potential challenge in both defending its transparency standards and building out a team in China, if the Chinese government were to change its stance towards the takedown notices.
“Ideally we will continue to operate in the same way we always have. If we can’t, that’s going to involve a pretty involved discussion. It’s core to who we are that we operate with that level of transparency,” said Ms Brescia.
Beijing is also trying to develop its own open-source projects. Earlier this year Huawei, who is currently blocked from most of its US suppliers, announced it was combining forces with the government and other domestic tech giants to set up a foundation to stimulate open-source software development at home.
“If China doesn’t have its own open-source community to maintain [open-source] code, all of China’s software industry is at great risk,” Wang Chenglu, Huawei’s director of software, said at the company’s developer conference.
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