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 specially invite front-line technical experts to share their own technical practices, hoping to bring some reference and thinking to more industry practitioners, and better grasp the future development trend of technology.
In this article, Zhuang Biaowei from Kaiyuan Society explores the current and future new trends of open source from the open source topics that are of concern to developers such as major open source events in 2022, open source business, open source security, and open source technology. Author of
| Kaiyuanshe-Zhuang Biaowei Editor | Produced by He Miao
| CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)
Starting in 2021, we have consciously organized and briefly commented on major events in the open source world to create "Open Source Events". Until 2022, when faced with nearly 300 open source-related news reports that had been collected and compiled, I found that things had become more difficult.
first is classification: so many events, how should they be classified? Some things seem to be both community events and business events, and are even related to open source security. What should I do?
The second is the choice: What is a big event? There are so many open source-related investments every year. How much investment is worthy of attention and triggers a lot of discussion? Is the impact on the world more important, or should we pay more attention to the impact on China?
concludes with a summary: When we try to look at these current stories from a historical perspective, which are trends worthy of attention, and which are just temporary excitement? The content below
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 be immune
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a "special military operation" and the Russo-Ukrainian war began. Subsequently, many major events also occurred in the world of open source. Open source, which seems to be far away from politics, cannot remain alone.
Many well-known open source communities and open source projects support Ukraine on GitHub and on their official websites. There are also voices calling on GitHub to ban Russian developers. On March 2, GitHub The official statement on the Russia-Ukraine war promised to "continue to ensure that free open source services are available to everyone, including Russian developers."
However, bans are still happening, and Russian developers and 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 have suspended their business in Russia or announced a ban on Russian code contributions.
On the other hand, excessive behavior is also constantly emerging. 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 all the bottom lines of justice until OSI ( Open Source Initiative ) issued a blog post condemning this behavior: "Open source "protest software" will eventually hurt open source."
In short, in the face of the violent and turbulent international political situation, what can open source people do, what cannot they do, what should they do, and what should they not do? These are very difficult questions!
The relationship between governments and open source is complicated
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 the argument is mainly based on the promotion effect of national policies on the open source industry. By 2022, we are observing 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, bipartisan legislation was passed to protect the security of open source software.
In Europe, more attention is paid to open source competition from the United States.On September 14, the EU General Court ruled and upheld the previous record fine of 4.1 billion euros against Google monopoly for "tying Google search/Chrome to the Android system."
In Asia, what is more "weird" is India's ban on VLC. Starting in February, the Indian government blocked the website and download links of the VLC player project. In October, the VLC player developers threatened to sue the Indian government, and the ban was lifted in November. 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 or the Indian people with reasons 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 an Intellectual Property Power and the Annual Promotion Plan for the Implementation of the "14th Five-Year Plan"" and the "Guiding Opinions of the General Office of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission on the Digital Transformation of the Banking and Insurance Industry". By 12 In September, the "Regulations on In-depth Synthesis Management of Internet Information Services" jointly issued by the National Internet Information Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Public Security will also have a profound impact on AIGC and the open source field.
In short, the government can take a variety of actions and formulate various policies for the open source industry and open source ecosystem. As for the impact, it remains to be observed and summarized in the long term.
More Chinese people 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 AIDATA Board; in August, Tina Tsou was elected as the chairman of the LF Edge Board. What is particularly eye-catching is that Tina is the first Chinese woman to serve as chairperson of the Enterprise Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group, and 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 Chinese open source contributors accounts for 9.5% of the world;
Open source projects led by Chinese developers account for 12.5% of the world;
Global company open source contribution list TOP50, China's share 20%;
international open source project TOP50, China only occupies two seats;
...
In a sense: it is already very good, but not good enough...
Open source reports and lists have been released one after another, with mixed results
Starting from 2015, Kaiyuan Society will release a "China Open Source Annual Report" every year. By 2022, there will be more and more people in the same camp. In July, the "2022 China Open Source Development Blue Book" was officially released; in August, the "China Open Source Development Research Analysis 2022" was released; in October, CSDN's "2022 China Open Source Contribution Report" was released; in November, the "2022 Open Source Big Data Heat Report" jointly produced by the Open Atom Open Source Foundation, X-lab Open Laboratory 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, companies and organizations are beginning to pay attention to open source information.
However, the GitHub Octoverse report released in November this year also came with some not-so-good news: among the 20.5 million new users this year, India, China, and Brazil had the largest increases, accounting for 32.4%, 15.6%, and 11.6% respectively. Among them, the number of developers in India grew more than that in China. Of course, this can also be interpreted as more Chinese developer growth happening on domestic open source platforms.
The development of open source platforms is still under exploration
In the Internet era, an increasingly obvious trend is: platform is king, and even open source is no exception. Therefore, every move made by the platform often affects everyone’s minds.From May 2021 to December 2022, GitHub's users grew from 65 million to 94 million in 18 months, while in 2020, this number was only 50 million. At the same time, domestic platforms are also growing rapidly. Although there is still a gap compared with GitHub in terms of total volume, the growth rate is not inferior.
In addition, various measures of the platform are often criticized. GitHub Copilot has been questioned, and the SFC is even calling for "Abandon GitHub, the time has come!" ”, by November, a programmer’s class action had been submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, requesting the court to approve $9 billion (approximately 64.9 billion yuan) in statutory damages against GitHub. As for how it will develop in the future, we will continue to pay attention in 2023.
The new policy launched by Gitee "open source warehouses must be reviewed before going online", and the new policy launched by Microsoft Store "prohibiting the commercial sale of open source software on the platform" have also been widely criticized.
In short, platform policies affect the whole body, so operators must not be careful!
The current situation of open source self-employed people, the dusk of individual heroism
In the process of reviewing the early history of free and open source software, we will encounter one after another famous names. These code heroes created a new era. Today, the news from open source people is often discouraging. Famous open source authors delete their libraries and run away, or are exploited by platforms, or are hired out by large companies, or are attacked by toxic comments and forced to leave, or announce a cessation of development and the closure of all projects because they have "no way to complain." There are also some unknown people who guard important open source projects. Because they just stick to their positions in obscurity, no one cares about them.
In short, the era of individual heroism is almost twilight. Those lonely self-employed people are gradually stepping off the stage and away from everyone's sight. And where will our open source world go?
