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For now, there are few clues as to what triggered the change, but censorship of certain types of language – profanity, pornography and politically sensitive words – has been creeping up on the platform for some time. Gitee’s official and public feedback pagethere are multiple users complaints About how projects were censored for obscure reasons, possibly due to confusing technical language with a sensitive word.

The immediate result of Gitee’s change on May 18 was that public projects hosted on the platform suddenly became unavailable without notice. Users complain about it interrupted services or ruined business deals. In order for the code to be made public again, developers must submit an application and verify that it does not contain anything that violates Chinese law or violates copyrights.

Li has gone through manual review for all of his projects on Gitee, and 22 out of 24 projects have been restored so far. “I’m assuming the review process isn’t a one-off thing, though, so the question is whether the friction of hosting projects will increase in the future,” he says. Still without a better local alternative, Li expects users to stay: “People may not like what Gitee is doing, but [Gitee] they will still have to take care of their day-to-day business.”

In the long run, this places an unreasonable burden on developers. “As you code, you also write comments and set names for variables. What developer wants to consider when writing code whether their code can trigger a list of sensitive words?” says Yao.

With almost every aspect of the internet, China’s way of creating its own alternative worked well in recent years. However, with open-source software being a direct product of cross-border collaboration, China seems to have hit a wall.

“This push to isolate the domestic open-source community from risks posed by the global community goes very far against the core premise of open-source technology development,” says Rebecca Arcesati, analyst at Mercator Institute of China Studies. co-author report On China’s talk of open source.

Technologists in China say they don’t want to break away from the global software development conversation and may feel uncomfortable with the direction China is going: “The harder Beijing works to nationalize open source and create a domestic ecosystem, the less willing developers will be as government-run open-source projects. they will be to participate in what they perceive.”

And cutting its global ties prematurely could interrupt the rapid growth of China’s open source software industry before the benefits to the economy are realized. It’s part of a broader concern that has eclipsed China’s tech sector as the government has stepped up regulation in recent years: Is China sacrificing the long-term benefits of technology for short-term impact?

“I’m struggling to see how China can do without these global connections with international open source communities and foundations,” says Arcesati. “We’re not at that stage yet.”