Every time you stream your favorite TV show, whether it’s on Netflix or iQiyi, chances are you are firing up some cloud servers somewhere that run on Linux, an open source operating system. If you use a smartphone made by Samsung, Huawei or Xiaomi, it’s running on Android, another open source operating system for mobile devices. 

Open source technology already permeates our digital lives, directly or indirectly. It’s also becoming an integral part of the industrial policy of countries seeking technological independence — from India and Israel to the UK and Japan. The most determined among them is China.

China’s accelerated push to become more technologically self-sufficient is likely fueled, in part, by its trade war with the U.S., and the export sanctions the U.S. has used against Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese technology firms. A core theme coming out of China’s most recent Fifth Plenum is scientific and technological self-reliance and self-improvement, with a new deadline of building a modern socialist country by 2035 — 15 years ahead of Deng Xiaoping’s original schedule.

China recognizes that open source technology can accelerate innovation, because not only is open source free to use, it also tends to produce the most robust and secure technology. It’s a no-brainer. By definition, an open source technology is public and accessible to any person connected to the internet to run, copy, modify, or distribute however she likes. Because open source is global by default, security experts and hackers everywhere can test the code for vulnerabilities. By the same token, an entire world’s engineering talent is (theoretically) available to work on any open source project. Because of its accessibility and quality, hacking on open source is also how many software developers learn and hone their skills, including a whole generation of top-tier Chinese engineers.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, of course. There are many nuances, difficulties, and tradeoffs to open source development, maintenance and management. One of open source’s core characteristics (and tradeoffs) is its radical expectation of openness and transparency, almost to a fault. In a well-run, successful project, every decision making process is published and every deliberation — from the project’s roadmap to its logo’s color scheme — is conducted in public for all to see. And when a corporation or a country tries to control it from the top-down, this “splintering” creates a tension against the grassroots, internet-native nature of open source. 

China’s best engineers and companies may be forced to use the designated “national champion” instead of the “best of breed.”

China appears to be doing exactly that. China has effectively balkanized many parts of the Internet into a “Splinternet” — frankly without much negative consequences — and controlling open source is a natural extension of that playbook. However, this move will likely backfire.

In August, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the state body in China with oversight over the Internet and broader tech sector, anointed Gitee, the Chinese domestic competitor to GitHub (the dominant global platform for open source software hosting and collaboration), as the winner of a government procurement request announced in May. While MIIT has referenced “open source” in its policy documents since 2016, it is officially getting its hands dirty by literally picking winners. This move likely means that any open source technology that MIIT uses will have to be hosted on Gitee. If the technology is already on GitHub (very likely), the company or team that runs the project will have to maintain another copy on Gitee. This “expectation” may extend to other government agencies and strategic areas, like banking, telecom, and public security.

Then in September, a Huawei-led non-profit organization, the OpenAtom Foundation, was unveiled. It is China’s first foundation of its kind to serve as alternatives to organizations like the Linux Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation, which are already working to foster China’s open source ecosystem.

These are the motions of “recreating the wheels” for the purpose of control, not unlike other parts of China’s internet economy. What’s different about this particular “splinternet” approach is that it discourages global contributions to China-originated open source projects, slows down innovation, and pisses off arguably the most important demographic China needs to achieve both self-reliance and self-improvement in technology: software developers.

Inside a company, not allowing your engineers the freedom to choose the technologies they want to use is a sure way to lose talent. In a country, doing the same will certainly derail any “talent strategy” or “innovation-driven development strategy” — two core tenets espoused in the Fifth Plenum’s official communique.

China has had a long history with open source and once took a more hands-off approach. Guangzhou held large open source conferences as far back as 2006, with participation from both the Linux Foundation and the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s economic planning agency. In 2008, Alibaba used open source alternatives to wean itself off of the dominance of IBM, Oracle, and EMC (the so-called “De-IOE”), which reduced its cost of growth and provided the foundation for its future as a technology powerhouse. Other companies and government agencies followed organically. 

Now, China’s best engineers and companies may be forced to use the designated “national champion” instead of the “best of breed.” And the country’s next generation of engineers may not have the freedom to learn from the best technologies available. Under this future, there will be no self-reliance or self-improvement. Even though China has been directionally correct in embracing open source, this increasingly top-down approach with a “splinternet” mindset will be counterproductive at best.

China needs (and wants) open source. But open source does not need China — certainly not in the same way that multinational corporations need access to China’s consumers for profit. Open source was created with an almost socialist worldview by computer scientists who believed that software should be a free public good, and not built for profit. And software developer growth is happening everywhere, so there is plenty of global talent to contribute to open source. Not picking winners and letting the best and brightest learn, build and collaborate with the rest of the world, free and out in the open, is the best way for China to meet its own deadline of building a socialist nirvana by 2035. 

Right now, it’s doing the opposite.

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