Editor | Xin Xiaoliang
Produced | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)
On October 24th, at the main venue of Yuelu Academy, Changsha China 1024 Programmer’s Festival, Jiang Tao, founder & chairman of CSDN and founding partner of Geekbang Venture Capital, published “Deep Roots and Leaves, Build a New Ecology of China’s Open Source Technology” At the same time, the “2022 China Open Source Contribution Report” was released on the spot.
We have the following key findings from this research:
Chinese open source contributors account for 9.5% of the world;
Open source projects led by Chinese developers account for 12.5% of the world;
Chinese projects go global: overseas contributors account for 33.7%;
Among the top 50 international open source projects, China only has two seats;
Although China has 30% of the world’s developer community, it only accounts for 9.5% of the world’s open source contributions. What’s worse is that the software tool ecological market only accounts for 1%, and the revenue of global software open source services is only 1% in China. China is still lagging behind in open source creation and wealth creation.
Among the top 20 open source projects in China, Alibaba has 6 seats;
Top 50 global companies’ open source contribution list, China accounts for 20%, and Huawei is far ahead;
For domestic enterprises in the open source field, Alibaba and Huawei are at the forefront, and Alibaba has 6 seats in the top 20 open source projects in China. Huawei has gathered a large number of developers and made open source contributions to Linux kernel, Rust and other projects, and is in a leading position.
Jiang Tao pointed out that in the next five years, China’s open source creation and wealth creation will usher in explosive development ! China’s open source will create a very large market, and China will also provide more contributions to open source creation. Among the top 50 global open source companies, there will be 20 in China. China has an advantage in new fields that combine software and hardware, such as robots, Internet of Things, and smart cars. At the same time, in emerging technologies such as distributed databases and artificial intelligence, China has autonomous systems that keep pace with the world.
For details, please see the lecture transcript.
“2022 China Open Source Contribution Report”: The user group is the first, and the wealth creation is completely behind
Open source is an important model for technological innovation, the foundation of the digital economy, and the core of software innovation. According to GitHub, 99% of software development projects with more than 1,000 lines of code have at least one open source dependency. On average, a software project works with more than 150 open source dependencies. From the Internet to the mobile Internet, to cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, all are driven by the open source ecosystem.
Therefore, the open source model has been widely valued by the industry, and my country has also listed open source as a major development strategy. China has the largest developer group accounting for 30% of the world, and there is huge room and potential for open source growth. With the continuous improvement of China’s contribution to the world’s open source, how to measure it objectively? It is becoming more and more important now.
Based on this, we first launched the “2022 China Open Source Contribution Report”. The report was jointly produced by CSDN GitCode, PingCAP OSSInsight, and Associate Professor Jing Qi from the School of Software and Microelectronics of Peking University. By selecting the head projects of Apache Foundation, CNCF Foundation, Linux Foundation, GitHub, CSDN, and Gitee, the data analysis and summary of Star, PR, Issue, and Commit in the past two years.
The release of the “2022 China Open Source Contribution Report” hopes to truly reflect the current situation of China’s open source development through objective data, and help promote the rapid development of open source in my country. From the data, we can see the following status quo.
Chinese open source contributors account for 9.5% of the world
There are many open source users in China, what is the number of contributors? The “China Open Source Contribution Report” screened out 5,394 top open source projects for analysis. Data shows that there are more than 210,000 developers worldwide who have contributed to open source in the past two years, of which about 10,000 are clearly from China, accounting for about 9.5% of the total number of contributors. Although it has improved, there is still a lot of room for improvement compared to 30% of the global development community.
Figure 1: Proportion of open source contributions from Chinese developers
Open source projects led by Chinese developers account for 12.5% of the world
According to whether the submissions in each project are submitted by Chinese developers, the main standard is that the ratio of submissions from developers marked as Chinese developers exceeds 40%, and the domestic community label information such as CSDN and Gitee is used as a reference, and 674 projects are confirmed as Projects led by Chinese developers account for about 12.5%.
Figure 2: Proportion of Chinese developers leading open source projects
Open source uses a big country, but open source creation and wealth creation lag behind significantly
Nevertheless, if we rank the global open source projects according to different dimensions, we will find that only two open source projects led by China have entered the top 50 in the world, one is Ant Design by Ant Group, and the other is Vue.js by You Yuxi .
Figure 3: Top 50 international open source projects
From the perspective of revenue and financing, only one Chinese company has entered the top 50 in the world, and that is TiDB. Among the new developers in the world, China accounts for 30%, and the open source projects led by Chinese developers account for 12.5% of the world, but the revenue of global software open source services, China accounts for only 1%.
Now that open source has become a model for technological wealth creation, the capital market is also optimistic about the development of open source technology. GGV partners once estimated in an analysis article that open source will create a new market of trillions of dollars. Although my country is a big country in the use of open source, it lags behind significantly in open source creation and wealth creation.
6 of the top 20 open source projects in China are from Alibaba
Although most open source projects are still launched by international companies, China’s open source forces have begun to enter the international stage. According to the data of GitHub Event, the report summarizes the “Top 20 Chinese Open Source Projects” (Note: Since the project ranking data released in this round mainly refers to the Event data in GitHub, the projects that currently have no data in GitHub have not been counted, such as OpenHarmony, openEuler, MindSpore, etc.).
Figure 4: Top 20 Chinese open source projects
It is worth noting that in the Top 20 projects, Ali Department (including Alibaba, Ant Group and Ele.me) accounted for 6 seats, which is not unrelated to Ali’s long-term precipitation on GitHub. As early as five years ago, Ali became the only Chinese company to be shortlisted for GitHub’s top contribution list.
Chinese companies open source contribution list, Huawei is far ahead
The top five Chinese companies contributing to open source are Huawei, Alibaba, MediaTek (Taiwan), Tencent and Espressif. Among them, Huawei’s contribution greatly exceeds that of other technology companies.
Figure 5: Top 20 Chinese companies’ open source contribution list
From the Commit data, Huawei has made a lot of open source contributions to international projects, including Linux kernel, Rust, etc., and is the top 1 Chinese company in the global open source project contribution. Similar is MediaTek, which focuses on contributing to Linux. Tencent’s contributions are mainly its own open source projects, including bk-ci (continuous integration platform), Matrix (performance monitoring framework), etc.
TOP50 of global companies’ open source contribution list, with China accounting for 20%
Among the top 50 companies with global contributions, 10 domestic companies are on the list. Overall, the top five are Google, Facebook, Intel, Red Hat, and AMD. Chinese companies on the list include Huawei, Alibaba, MediaTek (Taiwan), Tencent, Espressif, Baidu, ByteDance, ZTE, Realtek (Taiwan) and Taosi Data. Among them, Huawei’s contribution is far ahead, ranking sixth, Alibaba and MediaTek are also in the top 30, and the remaining seven are between 30 and 50.
Figure 6: Top 50 Open Source Contributions of Global Companies
Deep roots can lead to leafy leaves, and there is great potential to jointly build China’s root technology ecosystem.
China’s open source “lack of core and lack of soul”, essentially lack of “root technology”
What is the reason for this situation? Judging from the distribution of open source projects and market data, China’s open source “lack of core and lack of soul” still lacks “root technology”.
In the field of operating systems, the desktop Windows and macOS are divided into the world, while the mobile terminal is monopolized by iOS and Android. In the database field, the country with the most databases in the world is the United States, with 438 kinds, and China ranks second with 60 kinds. The contrast in programming languages is even stronger. There are more than 1,000 programming languages in the world, and more languages were born in the United States than in all other countries combined.
Figure 7: Number of programming languages by country
The reason for such a large leading advantage is that its industrial clusters and the original large companies (such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.) together constitute the US-led IT open source ecosystem, forming core competitiveness, and making it a worldwide market. It is the rule maker and the biggest profit maker, and it also brings it the competitive advantage of downstream industries.
At present, China’s root technology and software tool ecological market only accounts for 1%, and both products and ecology are obviously lagging behind. Therefore, it is urgent to develop my country’s root technology ecology.
The development of China’s root technology ecology has great potential
According to Statista analysis, the software market revenue will reach 593.4 billion US dollars in 2022, and it is expected that by 2027, the market size will reach 8.129 trillion US dollars (most of which are generated in the US market). key points that must be paid attention to.
Take the three root technology giants Microsoft, Apple, and Google as examples. Each company that builds the root technology ecosystem has a market value of over one trillion yuan.
Figure 8: Root Technology Ecological Layout
By analyzing its ecological layout and business model, we can see that all root technology manufacturers have their own development languages, development tools, and development chains, and are now moving towards cloudification. Therefore, the core secret of root technology is to “build a developer-friendly tool chain, build a huge ecological technology market, and move towards cloud-native services”. At present, China’s emerging open source databases are gradually increasing, many projects are beginning to emerge, and operating systems and programming languages are also making continuous progress, but the overall root technology ecosystem is still in its infancy. On the other hand, because it is in the initial stage, the root technology ecology has a huge market, and because there is a large gap, this is also an opportunity for China’s open source and developers.
How to develop China’s root technology ecology?
First, it is necessary to build a huge ecological technology market. The development of China’s root technology must have a large market of technology ecology. At present, in addition to the lack of core and soul, there is also a lack of software (open source) technology market.
Second, in addition to operating systems, databases, big data and other technologies, we also need to find new opportunities. Vigorously develop in the new root technology ecology such as AI, Metaverse, Internet of Everything, and Robotics. This is where China can show its talents.
Third, it is inseparable from talents to show their talents, as the so-called young people can win the world. A very important point is to cultivate young technical talents. With outstanding talents, technology and innovation have a foundation.
Golden age for open source developers
With the advent of the new era of global digitalization, software defines the world, software redefines automobiles, software redefines all walks of life, and developers are becoming more and more important. We are facing unprecedented opportunities. In this era, how should individual developers choose technologies and industries or industries?
Looking back on the past, we have experienced the era of PC, Internet, mobile Internet, and big data, and now we have built a new root technology ecosystem:
AI era: AI company Stable Diffusion will raise $1 billion in the near future;
Internet of Everything: Hongmeng Ecology is committed to connecting various sensors and embedded systems;
software-defined cars;
Intelligent robots: RPA, Robot, software robots are everywhere;
Metaverse: AR/VR, digital twin;
Web3: Blockchain, Ethereum, NFT;
A large number of other new technology ecosystems are still being established and emerging.
This is the golden age of open source in China. We will jointly build an open source and technology ecosystem with Chinese characteristics and integrate with the world. Today, only one of the top 50 global open source business values is in China, and only two are in the top 50 in terms of value creation. But in the next five years, we will usher in the explosive development of China’s open source creation and wealth creation, and it is expected that there will be 20 Chinese companies on the list.
Looking forward to the next five years of China’s open source
To achieve global leadership in the digital economy, it is necessary to become a global powerhouse of open source creation. The new technology ecosystem will bring greater opportunities. In the next five years, we will usher in the explosive development of China’s open source creation and wealth creation.
From the technical ecology, looking forward to the next five years of China’s open source, we will achieve:
Global technology ecological integration Two EcoSystem;
Top 50 global open source, 20 in China;
China has an advantage in the combination of software and hardware in robotics, the Internet of Things, and smart cars;
China has autonomous systems in emerging fields such as distributed databases and artificial intelligence.
China has an advantage in new fields that combine software and hardware, such as robots, the Internet of Things, and smart cars, and Chinese manufacturing is the core of global manufacturing. In new technological fields, such as distributed databases, artificial intelligence, China is synchronized with the world.
Open Source Opportunities for Chinese Developers
China has the widest market and the largest number of developers. If China wants to achieve global leadership in the digital economy, it must become a global powerhouse of open source creation, and there is an old saying in the open source field: the developer wins the world. With many open source developers, we can achieve more open source creation and open source wealth creation.
Chinese developers are ushering in the best era. I hope that the new generation of Chinese open source can actively participate in open source, become heroes of open source creation and wealth creation, and create open source products and open source services that originate from China and are oriented towards the global open source ecosystem.
Open source, CSDN has been in action
Around open source, CSDN has been in action:
The open source platform GitCode launched by CSDN hopes to create a good platform and ecology for Chinese open source projects and open source technical services, and to provide “China’s GitHub” for Chinese developers.
At the same time, CSDN released its own open source product CloudIDE, which is a Web IDE combined with a hosting platform. Whether it is hosted on GitHub, Gitee or CSDN’s GitCode, adding IDE (such as IDEGitHub.com) to its domain name prefix will You can pull open source projects to the corresponding programming environment, so that developers can preview and debug open source projects directly in the browser.
In addition, CSDN also has its own iView low-code tool, with 20,000+ Stars on GitHub.
Open source needs talent, top talent, and young talent. Around the top Chinese open source talents, CSDN has been conducting “Interviews with Open Source Heroes” to explore how open source heroes grow up. In order to let more young talents join the ranks of open source, CSDN and colleges and universities launched open source open courses, released “open source skill tree”, and taught more young people to learn open source.
Since the launch of the first code hosting platform CODE in 2013, CSDN has never stopped exploring and advancing, and is committed to open source, so that more developers can embrace open source, learn, use, create open source, and meet new opportunities, new challenges and new developments.
Epilogue
Software eats the world, and open source eats software. We believe that in the next five years, China’s open source creation and wealth creation will usher in explosive development! China Open Source Association continues to strengthen in the new technology field combining software and hardware, leading and producing a new open source ecology, integrating with the global technology ecology, and embarking on a new open source path with Chinese characteristics and an international ecology.
In the wave of open source in China, a group of new programmers will surely emerge and succeed, becoming a new generation of open source. They fully embrace open source culture and participate in open source contributions; they will become heroes of open source creation and wealth creation; they originate from China and go global.