Comment by justincormack
9 hours ago
The corporate environments were here too, most companies used to run on Windows server. 20 years ago companies used to pretend they didnt use Linux, but they were, it was just introduced to places they didnt know about, as it was free so it didnt have to go through purchasing. The rise of the early web in the post dotcom years was the catalyst, Perl, PHP, Linux servers etc. Before mobile, that did bring back proprietary development to some extent, for clientside. That was the era when Microsoft said "Linux was a cancer". Many companies still have large Windows (dot Net pre dotnet core) codebases, but Java mostly runs in Linux now.
The language barrier is interesting, there is more Chinese open source now too, but yes so much is English. I remember using google translate for Nginx from Russian back in the day, and openresty from Chinese, but yes we are lucky,
Gitee in China is certainly robust, but when you think about the sponsorship system, it's closer to an incubation environment for corporate ecosystems. There are a lot of public codes intended for national projects or large enterprise collaborations, so it's actually good for grasping Chinese tech trends. I sometimes find it fascinating how free the Western GitHub system can be.
It really makes me realize just how different cultures and values can be.
Sometimes I feel like I want to be as free as you all are, but I also recognize that my own biases are deeply ingrained. There's a line in Demian that goes, 'The bird fights its way out of the egg.' It makes me strongly feel just how narrow my world really is