China, Gitee, GitHub

 En Technology Review, del MIT, el 30 de mayo, escribe Zeyi Yang

Earlier this month, thousands of software developers in China woke up to find that their open-source code hosted on Gitee, a state-backed Chinese competitor to the international code repository platform GitHub, had been locked and hidden from public view.

Gitee released a statement later that day explaining that the locked code was being manually reviewed, as all open-source code would need to be before being published from then on. The company “didn’t have a choice,” it wrote. Gitee didn’t respond to MIT Technology Review, but it is widely assumed that the Chinese government had imposed yet another bit of heavy-handed censorship.

For the open-source software community in China, which celebrates transparency and global collaboration, the move has come as a shock. Code was supposed to be apolitical. Ultimately, these developers fear it could discourage people from contributing to open-source projects, and China’s software industry will suffer as a result

 Una nueva muestra de la dependencia de grandes actores existente en el mundo Open Source en primer lugar. Pero yendo más lejos, una indicación de la limitada capacidad de elección existente en el mundo de la tecnología y de las ideas y culturas transportadas por su medio. El problema descubierto por los desarrolladores chinos con su propio repositorio "oficial" puede repetirse potencialmente en el mundo occidental, bajo el sello de las grandes tecnológicas que dominan directa o indirectamente los repositorios abiertos, "públicos", y las infraestructuras y servicios en la nube. Ni Google, ni Microsoft, ni Amazon han demostrado neutralidad en su historia, y son protagonistas de décadas de juicios por prácticas desleales. Confiar tu base de código, o tus aplicaciones en este marco no es lo más apropiado, probablemente.