CSDN is a tech forum/news site, kinda like Techcrunch. It has been around for quite a few years. This github like thingi seems like a joint effort between CSDN and Tencent, whose open source projects (currently six of them) can be found at https://code.csdn.net/Tencent.
Traditionally, China doesn't have a strong open source culture and Github was being blocked every now and then. Hopefully a Github clone backed by big players can change that.
Editor in Chief at CSDN here. CSDN is the biggest online community for developers and IT pros in China with more than 30 million registered members. Its news and discussion service part is more like HN or Reddit/programming other than Tech Crunch. And it also has services for blogging, code hosting, programming training and careers, all developers centered.
The code hosting service under discussion is based on Gitlab, developed and operated by CSDN staff. Tencent became a sponsor this year.
And because there are not enough open source projects and contributors in China, we are instead building user community around open source projects at first. It will be a little different with Github way.
The 'real' Github clone in China is called gitcafe, available at: https://gitcafe.com
I have been involved with the community for many years... and therefore I do not completely agree with your statement: "there are not enough open source projects and contributors in China". We have them, and they generally contribute directly to the projects involved (as it should be as you do not want to create islands/insular projects). Local (and localized) initiatives are great and I hope this is what you meant.
I mean that the number of people who contribute to, the quality and activity of local projects is not very good, compared to the projects on Github. And the contribution from China to international projects is also not very big.
The open sources community in China is still small and lack solid industry support. We should build a bigger community and let more people have the ability and will to contribute.
I am in charge of CSDN development team. We don't have a plan to make an English version yet as for now our focus is still on local open source community setup. Maybe one day when the situation is mature enough...
+1. Too often organisations like CSDN, 51CTO, etc believe that the Chinese market is 'totally' different and therefore needs a different approach/method. They still need to realize it is not the message itself, but 'how' you tell the message.
Side note: I have been closely involved in the Chinese Fedora community; assisting and streamlining procedures within the community and getting the community members closer aligned with the project and project goals. As a project we actually haven't treated Asia or China any different from other regions, such as South America, Europe, etc.
China market is not totally different of course, which is self-explanatory that we have similar services with Github, Stackoverflow, Wordpress and Hacker News.
However, it is still different, sometimes very different in details and implementation. And the difference needs time and efforts to eliminate.
I think Github team may learn something from the Chinese (and I recall this is true in many Eastern Asian) community. Portal is essential in many popular Chinese websites. People like reading columns and discover things from headlines and visual columns.
Imagine Github offers a way for organizaitons to publish news! So instead of me going to blog.mozilla.org or blog.github.com to find out what's going on, I can just subscribe to an organization, get a newsfeed of their latest releases and announcement, and highlight commits (ex: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/59) !
I don't have time to implement this as an idea, but I think Github has that resource to implement it.
I think that the popularity of portal sites in East Asian countries is tied to their high-context cultures, so I doubt they would be very popular in the low-context West.
The use of highly cluttered web designs is also a distinctly East Asian phenomenon, but I'm not sure what the cultural explanation for that would be. It's especially odd to see it in Japan, where a more sparse aesthetic dominated the traditional culture.
You reminded me of the sheer abominable genius of the website for Ling's Cars http://www.lingscars.com/ which is one of the finest examples of this in the UK.
> The use of highly cluttered web designs is also a distinctly East Asian phenomenon, but I'm not sure what the cultural explanation for that would be.
I think it has to do with East Asian languages in general having a much higher information density, so their designs also reflect that. To me, that author's examples of "beautiful web design" appear relatively contentless and unfinished (except for the first one), while those he dislikes are obviously content-centric and seem far more pragmatic and useful.
The bias is quite evident in that article: "One culture's clutter is another culture's useful information." Being from the East myself, I've always found the increasingly "information-averse" nature of the West to be a little odd.
Short version, in a 'high context culture', things can be left unsaid and the cultural background will explain effectively to people within that culture (and less effectively to people outside that culture).
A Texan (the American south is high context) can say quite a bit with 'yep...' and letting the culture explain the rest of the meaning.
In a low context culture, less emphasis is placed on single word choices (though they can still be important) and more explanation of the entire context of the communication is done.
It is partly true. That's why CSDN tried to adopt a different strategy other than Github.
Quality and quantity of original open source projects in China are not good enough. As the 1st step, CSDN is trying to foster the culture. To have the IT giants, like Tencent onboard, is definitely helpful to attract more engineers to play some parts in the game.
I wonder what sort of technologies are popular in China. Heard rumors that there was a thriving golang community there, but that's literally the extent of my knowledge.
I don't really think there is anything special. I don't actually grow up in China as a programmer but when I was a kid PHP was a big thing due to the popularity of BBS like phpBB and Chinese's Discuz!. You can find Python, Java, C++, and .NET just like in America. Though I find (based on limited experience) Ruby is not a very popular language in China.
Wow, those charts are really surprising. Maybe it's just because I'm a web developer and sort of walled off inside the foreigner tech scene, but in my experience most companies here (in Shanghai) seem to exist in either Java or PHP land (based on what my boss has said about hiring and job postings I've seen).
What really makes a difference is that, in China, online gaming is really huge, possibly the biggest cash cow for most of internet companies. This makes language like Go and Erlang really popular in China, for their performance in concurrency.
They're really good at copying and improving. Look at the Jiayu G5; it looks like an iPhone, with the metal casing, except stainless steel instead of aluminium... running Android, with dual-SIM, expandable storage, and removable battery.
Well, some copies are good, some are bad. I think it depends how much problem they solved and how much improvement they contributed. The best always be copied by others.
I used to think that the Chinese copied things that other people did because they wanted to make a living off of it. But lately I've been wondering if there's (1) a culture-wide case of not-built-here-ism, (2) a fear of doing things differently, and last but not least (3) the fact interactions in Chinese culture seem remarkably and subtlely different from interactions in Western culture.
(1) explains why they would clone something as mundane (and not wildly profitable) as github (as linked elsewhere in these comments).
(2) explains why I have heard Singaporean friends from school say, lets make a Singaporean Yelp! Westerners say, lets make a yelp for <different purpose>.
(3) explains why they would want their own forums and "public spaces."
These reasons seem as plausible (and a lot less malicious) than merely, the Chinese copy everything for fun and profit (even though there are elements of that elsewhere), and I think it's worth thinking about these differences in culture, because it helps us look into our own faults.
Not sure why you were downvoted, I think you're making fair points; I live in Korea and see very similar mindsets here.
Another reason specific to China is that it's downright impossible for a foreign company to operate an internet service there, the required licenses are incredibly complex to acquire. For instance, in order for Microsoft to launch Azure in China, they had to partner up with the biggest Chinese hosting company (21Vianet).
Trying to talk about these things in Western circles is kind of curious. I could make these points with my Native-born Asian friends from college just fine. Actually, I can see some of them saying these things outright. There's a weird line drawn where you can say "A Chinese copy of Github," with all the implications it entails, but you can't go further than that. In my mind, the title is inflammatory; I was borderline being apologist, and suggesting there are ways in which the West is no better, which means that no one is happy.
Traditionally, China doesn't have a strong open source culture and Github was being blocked every now and then. Hopefully a Github clone backed by big players can change that.