The twilight of personal heroism is approaching, and the 6 major status quo talks about the year of open source

This article comes from the “2022 Technology Annual Inventory” column planned by CSDN. This column will focus on core technical fields such as programming languages, open source, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, architecture services, databases, chips, development tools, etc., and invite front-line technical experts to share their technical practices in person, hoping to serve more industries Practitioners bring some reference and thinking to better grasp the future development trend of technology.

In this article, Zhuang Biaowei from Open Source Society explores the current and future trends of open source from the open source topics that developers care about, such as the big open source event in 2022, open source business, open source security, and open source technology.

Author| Kaiyuanshe-Zhuang Biaowei Editor-in-charge| He Miao

Produced | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)

Starting in 2021, we have consciously sorted out and briefly commented on major events in the open source world to make “Open Source Memorabilia”. Until 2022, in the face of nearly 300 news reports related to open source that have been collected and sorted out, it turns out that things have become more difficult.

The first is classification: so many events, how should they be classified? What about something that seems to be part community event, part commercial event, and even related to open source security?

The second is the trade-off: what counts as a big event? There are so many open source-related investments every year, how much investment is worthy of attention and arouses a lot of discussion? Is the impact on the world important, or should more attention be paid to the impact on China?

Finally, a summary: When we try to look at these current stories from a historical perspective, which ones are trends worthy of attention, and which ones may be just a moment of excitement?

The following content is my annual summary of the open source community and ecological attempts in the five categories of “open source business, open source security, open source technology, open source legal & compliance, open source community & ecology”.

Politics is everywhere, and open source cannot stand alone

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a “special military operation” and the Russo-Ukrainian war began. Subsequently, in the world of open source, many major incidents also occurred. Open source, which seems to be far away from politics, also cannot stand alone.

Many well-known open source communities and open source projects support Ukraine on GitHub and their official website. There are also voices calling for GitHub to ban Russian developers , so that on March 2, GitHub officially issued a statement on the Russia-Ukraine war, promising to ” We will continue to ensure that free and open source services are available to everyone, including developers in Russia.”

However, banning incidents are still happening, and Russian developers, even former employees of Russian companies, and open source contributors from Russia have been accidentally injured, and traces of their contributions to open source projects have also been deleted. There are also many enterprise-level “sanctions”. Open source companies either suspend their business in Russia , or announce a ban on Russian code contributions.

On the other hand, radical behaviors are constantly appearing. The outbreak of the node-ipc incident finally aroused the vigilance of all open source people. Poisoning in an open source way finally broke through the bottom line of all justice. Until OSI (Open Source Code Promotion Will) published a blog post denouncing this behavior: “Open Source ‘Protest Software’ Will Ultimately Hurt Open Source”.

In short, in the face of the violent and turbulent international political situation, what can open source people do, what can’t they do, what should they do, and what should they not do? All very difficult questions!

The relationship between governments and open source is complex

In 2021, we observed that “the open source policies of various countries will have a major impact on the future of the open source world”, but we mainly argue from the role of national policies in promoting the open source industry. By 2022, we have observed many more and more complex phenomena.

The United States is mainly concerned about open source security issues. In January and May, the White House convened the Open Source Foundation and IT giants twice to discuss open source software security issues, and launched a $150 million open source software protection plan. In September, the bipartisan Legislate to protect open source software security .

In Europe, more attention is paid to open source competition from the United States. On September 14, the General Court of the European Union made a ruling, upholding the previous record fine of 4.1 billion euros for Google’s monopolistic behavior, on charges of “tying Google Search/Chrome with the Android system.”

In Asia, what is more “wonderful” is India’s ban on VLC. Beginning in February, the Indian government blocked the website and download links of the VLC player project. In October, the VLC player developer threatened to sue the Indian government. In November, the ban was lifted. From the beginning of the ban on VLC to the current lifting of the ban, the Indian government has not made any statement, nor has it provided the VideoLAN Foundation and the Indian people with a reason for banning VLC, which is indeed puzzling.

As for China, following the “14th Five-Year Plan” in 2021, in 2022 the country further proposed the “Outline for Building a Powerful Intellectual Property Country and the Annual Promotion Plan for the Implementation of the “14th Five-Year Plan”, “The General Office of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission on Banking In December, the National Internet Information Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Public Security jointly issued the “Internet Information Service Deep Synthesis Management Regulations”, which will also affect AIGC and the open source field. deep influence.

All in all, the government can impose a variety of actions and formulate various policies for the open source industry and the open source ecosystem. As for the impact, it remains to be observed and summarized in the long term.

More Chinese are exerting influence in the open source community

In 2022, there is a lot of good news from international foundations. In March, Jiang Ning was elected as a director of the Apache Foundation , and Du Junping was re-elected as the chairman of the LF AI&DATA Board; in August, Tina Tsou was elected as the chairman of the LF Edge Board. Among them, Tina is the first Chinese woman to chair the working group of the Enterprise Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and also the youngest speaker from Asia in the history of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) . She also served as chair of the Akraino Technical Steering Committee.

According to CSDN’s “2022 China Open Source Contribution Report “, we can also see more data:

• The number of open source contributors in China accounts for 9.5% of the world;

• Open source projects led by Chinese developers account for 12.5% ​​of the world;

• China accounts for 20% of the TOP50 open source contribution list of global companies;

• Among the TOP50 international open source projects, China only has two seats;

…

In a sense: good enough, but not good enough…

Open source reports and lists have been released, with mixed results

Beginning in 2015, Kaiyuanshe has released a “China Open Source Annual Report” every year. By 2022, there will be more and more people in the same direction. In July, “2022 China Open Source Development Blue Book” was officially released; in August, “China Open Source Development Research Analysis 2022” was released; in October, CSDN “2022 China Open Source Contribution Report” was released; in November, Open Atom Open Source Foundation, X The “2022 Open Source Big Data Heat Report” jointly produced by -lab Open Lab and Alibaba was released. This in itself is a major signal!

On the one hand, we can see more data, more trends and rankings. On the other hand, we can also see that more and more institutions, enterprises and organizations are beginning to pay attention to open source information.

However, the GitHub Octoverse report released in November this year also brought some bad news: Among the 20.5 million new users added this year, India, China and Brazil recorded the largest increases, accounting for 32.4% and 15.6% respectively , 11.6%, among which the number of developers in India grew faster than that in China. Of course, this can also be interpreted as more Chinese developers have grown on domestic open source platforms.

The development of the open source platform is still being explored

In the Internet age, an increasingly obvious trend is: the platform is king, even open source is no exception. Therefore, every move of the platform often affects everyone’s minds. From May 2021 to December 2022, GitHub users will grow from 65 million to 94 million in 18 months, up from 50 million in 2020. At the same time, domestic platforms are also growing rapidly. Although there is still a gap compared with GitHub in total, the growth rate is not inferior.

In addition, the various measures of the platform are often criticized. GitHub Copilot has been questioned , and SFC is even calling for “Abandon GitHub, the time has come!” 》 , By November, a class action lawsuit by programmers had been submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, asking the court to approve the $9 billion (about 64.9 billion yuan) statutory damages against GitHub. As for how it will develop in the future, we will continue to pay attention to it in 2023.

Gitee’s new policy “Repository open source must be reviewed before going online”, and Microsoft Store’s new policy “Prohibition of commercial sales of open source software on the platform” has also been widely criticized.

In a word, platform policies affect the whole body, operators must not be careless!

The status quo of open source self-employed individuals, the twilight of individual heroism

In the process of reviewing the early history of free and open source software, we will encounter one after another, these code heroes have ushered in a new era. Today, the news from open source folks is often depressing. Famous open source authors deleted their libraries and ran away, or were exploited by platforms, or were prostituted by big companies, or were forced to leave after being attacked by poisonous speeches, or announced that they would stop development and close all projects because there was no way to appeal. There are also some unknown people who guard important open source projects, because they are only obscurity and stick to their positions, so no one cares about them.

All in all, the age of individual heroism is drawing to a close. Those lonely self-employed people are gradually walking off the stage, away from everyone’s sight. And where will our open source world go?

The text and pictures in this article are from CSDN