Interpreting open source in 2021: from a "developer subculture" to a mainstream software development model

Author | Cai Fangfang

This article is one of the "2021 InfoQ Annual Technical Inventory and Outlook" series of articles, produced by infoQ editorial board, focusing on the important developments and developments in the open source field in 2021, hoping to help you accurately grasp the core development of the open source field in 2021. Among the ten areas covered by the InfoQ Annual Technology Inventory and Outlook, open source is a relatively special existence, it is a development model rather than a specific technology, and it is closely related to the other nine technology areas. In almost every technology area, we see changes triggered by or closely related to open source. This article will mainly take stock of open source dynamics from the macro level.

"InfoQ Annual Technical Inventory and Outlook" is one of the most important content topics of InfoQ throughout the year, covering ten major areas of architecture, AI, big data, big front-end, cloud computing, database, middleware, operating system, open source, and programming language, and will be extended into special topics, mini books, live broadcast weeks, and collection pages in the InfoQ media matrix, welcome everyone to continue to pay attention.

I would like to thank Huang Dongxu, Liang Bing, Li Wanpeng, Wang Xiaorui, and Yan Qing (in alphabetical order) for their contributions to this article, whose insights are the key to meeting you in this article. At the same time, I sincerely thank all the authors of the 2021 China Open Source Annual Report initiated by the Open Source Society, through this opportunity to participate in the exchange and writing of the 2021 China Open Source Annual Report, the author can further understand the panorama of the open source development in the past year. The 2021 China Open Source Annual Report will be available soon, so stay tuned.

What is 2021 like for open source?

Whether you work on open source or not, you should have been able to sense the high level of attention and discussion about open source in the past year.

From a global perspective, in the past year, open source as a whole has shown a trend of rapid development, and has increasingly become a consensus across borders and languages. According to the latest official report, the number of active users and active code repositories on GitHub has increased significantly in 2021, of which the number of new active users has exceeded 16 million and the number of new active code repositories has exceeded 61 million. In terms of Github active user distribution, North American users still account for the largest proportion (31.5%, down 2.3% from last year), followed by Asia (31.2%, an increase of 0.3% over last year), but the two are very close in the number of active users, followed by Europe (27.3%, an increase of 0.7% from last year), South America (5.9%, an increase of 1% from last year), Africa (2.3%, an increase of 0.3% from last year), Oceania (1.7%, A decrease of 0.1% compared to last year.

We believe that open source is gradually moving from a "developer subculture" to a mainstream software development model, and 2021 will be a critical year in this transition. This may be more obvious in China, where the rapid growth of cloud computing and the risk of supply disruption brought about by the Sino-US trade war have greatly promoted domestic investment in the field of open source.

First of all, the attention of open source has increased dramatically, not only at the level of developers and enterprises, but also at the level of national strategy. Abroad, the European Commission (European Commission) released the "Study on the Impact of Open Source Software and Hardware on Technological Independence, Competitiveness and Innovation in the EU Economy" in September 2021, studying the impact of open source software (OSS) and open source hardware (OSH) on the EU economy from multiple perspectives; domestically, open source was written into the national "14th Five-Year Plan" for the first time. Open source has broken through the original relatively niche developer circle and received more and more attention from outsiders, especially from large enterprises in the fields of finance, telecommunications, and the new economy.

Second, enterprises are increasing their investment in open source, and more developers are devoting themselves to open source. More than one expert interviewed told InfoQ that their company is increasingly recognizing and supporting open source efforts. The change from using open source to contributing to open source to building an open source ecosystem is happening in many Chinese companies.

In the past year, the atmosphere of large enterprises adopting open source has also changed from wait-and-see to accelerated investment, and more large technology companies have chosen the open source route. Taking the database field as an example, open source has become the first choice for distributed databases for large enterprises. DB-Engines statistics also show that from 2021 onwards, the popularity index of open source databases has surpassed that of commercial databases.

The chart below records the top 10 projects in 2021 for typical Chinese companies to be active on GitHub (number of Events). The popularity of these projects can reflect the popularity of open source in China to a certain extent. The data comes from the GitHub Archive, a publicly available archive of data used to record GitHub's public activities, provided by the PingCAP community.

Based on the data of the GitHub Archive in the past 10 years, selecting typical domestic enterprises can see that the number of active warehouses in China's open source has increased significantly, from 29 in 2011 to 5067 at the end of December 2021, a compound growth rate of 67%.

Note: Active repository: refers to a repository that has had at least one event in a year, such as PushEvent, IssueCommentEvent, ReleaseEvent, PullRequestEvent, etc. (with a total of 21 types of behaviors);

Typical enterprises include: Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Byte, Meituan, Didi, Huawei, JD.com, Xiaomi, NetEase, Bilibili, WeBank, Ctrip, PingCAP and more than 40 companies.

"Looking back at the development of domestic open source in the past decade: the early stage is a cultural strategy, mainly to encourage engineer culture; the medium term has become a technology strategy, enterprises need to solve the problem of technology silos; now it has become the business strategy of many Internet technology companies, at this time open source is no longer optional, but must be invested in the field, open source level wins the opportunity to reach more developers, can greatly help the success of enterprise ToB business." This concludes with InfoQ.

In addition to increasing and accelerating investment at the enterprise level, commercial companies based on open source projects have also been highly recognized by capital on a global scale. For example, HashiCorp and GitLab, which went public this year, have a market capitalization of $15.2 billion and GitLab worth $10.8 billion. More unlisted start-ups have also been raised, with the amount and valuation of financing constantly refreshing the ceiling.

Looking back at the year of 2021, the tide of open source continues to roll forward, for Chinese developers, what other changes are worth paying attention to and thinking about? What events are likely to affect the future of open source? The following is based on the collation of data and feedback from the interviewed experts, and reviews and summarizes around several key directions.

Five changes worth paying attention to

Open source rises to a strategic level at the national level

In 2021, the multinational release policy will elevate open source to the strategic height of the national level, affirming the importance of the open source model to the innovation of information technology and the development of the software industry, and taking the development of open source and prosperity of the open source ecosystem as an important task.

In September 2021, the European Commission released the "Study on the Impact of Open Source Software and Hardware on Technological Independence, Competitiveness and Innovation in the EU Economy", which conducted systematic research on how open source software (OSS) and open source hardware (OSH) can promote the EU economic recovery, digital transformation, and digital autonomy. The report mentions that investments in open source software can yield an average of four times the return. The results of the study predict that if the EU's open source contribution increases by 10%, the region's GDP will increase by 100 billion euros, more than double the value of the EU's open source software. At the same time, more than 600 new ICT startups are added each year.

On December 8, 2021, the European Commission announced that it is adopting new rules on open source software that provide public access to its software solutions as long as there is potential benefit to people, companies, or other social public services. Under the new rules, the commission will bring significant value to companies, start-ups, innovators, public administrations, etc. by open sourceing its software solutions, and this decision will also spur innovation.

Domestically, open source was written into the "14th Five-Year Plan" software and information technology service industry development plan, which can be said to be the most concerned event in 2021.

On November 30, 2021, the Information Technology Development Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "14th Five-Year Plan" Software and Information Technology Service Industry Development Plan (hereinafter referred to as the "Planning"), which focuses on "open source reshaping the new ecology of software development" as one of the four major development situations of China's software industry during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period. The "Planning" emphasizes that the open source model has become the leading model of global software technology and industrial innovation, and it can be said that "software defines the future world, and open source determines the future of software". At the same time, the "Planning" puts forward the key tasks of "prospering the domestic open source ecology", and sets up a special action of "open source ecological cultivation", comprehensively promotes the construction of high-level foundations, creates excellent open source projects, deepens the application of open source technology, consolidates open source infrastructure, popularizes open source culture, improves open source governance mechanisms and governance rules, strengthens international cooperation on open source, and promotes the formation of an open source software ecology of public research and mass creation.

This will have a very far-reaching impact on the long-term development of open source in China, and the interviewee told InfoQ:

"We can see that the government's support at the open source level is getting stronger and stronger, especially in solving the problem of software supply chain, from the government, to enterprises, to developers, they all firmly believe that open source is a must." Only market-approved software and user-scale software can generate huge commercial and social value, and open source is the best way to achieve this goal. ”

"With the introduction of the Plan, we expect and believe that China's open source can evolve from disorderly prosperity to orderly prosperity."

The influence of Open Source in China has gradually increased

According to the latest GitHub Annual Developer Report, nearly 1.03 million new Chinese developers on GitHub in 2021, accumulating about 7.55 million, and more and more open source enthusiasts from China are participating in various open source projects.

In the Apache Software Foundation, Linux Foundation, CNCF and other international open source foundations, there are more and more open source projects originating from China. This year, the Apache Software Foundation welcomed 5 open source projects from China, namely EventMesh, ShenYu, Kyuubi, Linkis, and SeaTunnel, and the number of single theories should be the highest in the calendar year.

At the same time, more Chinese companies and open source people are playing an important role in the International Foundation:

On February 9, 2021, the Rust Foundation was officially established, and Huawei is one of the founding Platinum members;

On March 11, 2021, the Apache Software Foundation announced the new list of directors on its official website, and Tetrate.io Founding Engineer, founder of ApacheSkyWalking and PMC Wu Sheng became the only new director of this year;

In August 2021, the Linux Foundation established the open source security foundation OpenSSF, and in October 2021, Tencent became the first company in China to join OpenSSF.

On November 2, 2021, the Linux Foundation established the NextArch Foundation, with Tencent joining as a founding company;

In November 2021, Junping Block, Chairman of the Open Atom Foundation TOC, Member of the Apache Software Foundation, and General Manager of HUAWEI CLOUD and Computing Open Source Business, was elected Chairman of the Board of Directors of the LF AI & Data Foundation.

On November 24, 2021, Tencent Cloud joined the FinOps Foundation as a top member, and Shan Zhihao, chairman of the Tencent Open Source Alliance, and Meng Fanjie, expert engineer of Tencent Cloud, also joined the FinOps Foundation's Board of Directors and Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) respectively.

Wang Yehui, an engineer at Huawei's Open Source Competence Center, was elected to the Board of Directors of the Linux Foundation CHAOSS Program.

All of the above shows that the influence of Chinese developers and open source projects in the open source world is constantly increasing. We have reason to believe that with the development of Open Source in China, there will be more and more high-quality Chinese open source projects and open source communities in the future, and more Chinese open source talents will emerge. Some experts interviewed said: "In the past few years, Chinese developers have gradually changed from open source users to contributors, if we look back in a few years, today may be a new year for the entire China or the development system with Chinese as the mainstream communication language, that is, Chinese developers have begun to really dominate some core platform-level software products or technical directions." ”

But at the same time, we also need to see that There is still a lot of room for improvement in China's open source influence, as mentioned in the interpretation of the "14th Five-Year Plan" Software and Information Technology Service Industry Development Plan, the domestic open source ecological construction is still in its infancy. Some interviewed experts told InfoQ bluntly: "We may still be in the 'awakening era' or the embryonic stage, although GitHub data shows that the number of open source contributors in China has jumped to the second place in the world, but this may be partly due to the demographic dividend." ”

According to X-lab Open Lab's "China Ten Years of Open Source Insight Report" released in October 2021, although the popularity of domestic open source is increasing and the number of open source developers in China is growing rapidly, the proportion of Chinese developers in domestic open source projects is still higher, and the degree of internationalization needs to be strengthened. In terms of the number of projects and the activity of developers, it is still the head Internet manufacturer leading the domestic open source.

Data show that 96.6% of the top 500 companies in China do not understand open source, and only 2% of the top 500 companies participate in open source contributions. In contrast, 79.2% of Fortune 500 companies understand open source, and 22% of Fortune Global 500 companies participate in open source contributions.

Open source governance and open source compliance are the focus of attention

As 2021 drew to a close, the Apache Log4j2 CVE-2021-44228 security breach exploded in the open source circle and even the entire IT circle. Due to the low threshold for exploit and the wide application of Log4j, the impact of this security breach incident is very far-reaching, and a large number of enterprises at home and abroad have been affected.

In recent years, while the rapid development of open source, open source software security incidents have also occurred frequently, and open source software supply chain governance is crucial. The Log4j2 security vulnerability incident further made everyone aware of this importance, and triggered a big discussion about the security of the open source software supply chain, and the discussion on the rationality of the open source software vulnerability release process and the open source projects and foundation organizations behind it was also very intense.

Around the issue of open source governance, in the past year, the Linux Foundation has actively promoted the integration and exchange of OpenChain domestic and foreign communities, and the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and many domestic enterprises have paid close attention to or joined it. In addition, how enterprises open source, project open source process, open source project measurement and other issues are also the focus of industry attention. Based on quantitative models, the evaluation of the effectiveness of community governance has become the "standard" for more and more mature open source organizations. The Linux Foundation has also promoted the establishment of CHAOSS, an open source project that measures the health of open source projects and communities, which is worth noting.

On the other hand, as open source code is increasingly used in various industries, some open source projects have become "big business", and discussions around open source legal and compliance topics are increasingly put on the table as one of the core issues. In the past year, there have been several incidents and controversies surrounding open source project trademarks and open source licenses.

On January 20, 2021, Elastic CEO Shay Banon said in a post on the company's official website that they decided to change the open source license of Elasticsearch and Kibana from Apache 2.0 to a server side public license (SSPL) and elastic license. The move is intended to limit the use and monetization of Elasticsearch as a service by cloud service providers without giving back to the open source community, behind years of confrontation between Elastic and Amazon.

In 2015, Amazon launched its own Elasticsearch service and named it Amazon Elasticsearch Service. In Elastic's view, Amazon's unauthorized use of the word "Elasticsearch" in the name of its own hosting service is a clear trademark infringement and has caused confusion about the ownership of Elasticsearch in the market, so Elastic sued Amazon in 2019.

But because of the slow litigation process, Elastic took the initiative to change the license, accelerating Amazon's move away from the Elasticsearch brand. The move did work, and in September 2021, Amazon Elasticsearch Service was renamed Amazon OpenSearch Service. Amazon executives also said they will step up efforts to establish and maintain the ALv2 licensing branch of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.

In fact, neither the SSPL nor the Elastic License meetSID's open source definition, so Elastic's announcement of changes to the open source license caused a huge controversy in the community.

Other similar incidents include the announcement by the founding team of the foreign data query engine Presto to Rename PrestoSQL to Trino because Facebook has registered the Presto trademark; the domestic analytical database system DorisDB has changed its name to StarRocks (whether it is suspected of infringing the Apache Doris trademark is unknown), and a high-profile announcement of the adoption of elastic License 2.0 (ELv2) license (also inconsistent with OSI). Open source definition) "open source" and caused industry criticism.

License disputes and trademark disputes are ubiquitous in the open source field, how to judge the rationality and potential risks of open source licenses? How does permissive licensing protect the interests of the founding team of an open source project? How is the interests of cloud vendors and the open source community balanced? None of these questions have yet been satisfactorily answered, and confusion and discussion are expected to continue in the future.

In June 2021, the GPL copyright dispute case heard by the Intermediate People's Court of Shenzhen Municipality, Guangdong Province, was considered to be the first case in China to clarify the legal effect of the GPL-3.0 agreement. This precedent may help the open source community to defend its rights in the future, but some people believe that this actually puts forward higher requirements for code compliance.

Open source startups are more active than ever, and their business value is recognized by capital

In the past year, domestic and foreign start-ups based on open source projects have been unprecedentedly active, financing or listings have been common, and the amount of financing and valuation/market value have been constantly refreshing the upper limit, and the commercial value of the open source community and open source software has been recognized in the capital market.

The experts interviewed told InfoQ, "The fact that these companies have received financing or going public marks that open source software has finally found a good business model in the cloud-native era and solved the problem of commercialization." 2021 will become the first year for China's open source to enter the mainstream business world. ”

Here's an incomplete statistic on open source startup financing and listings in 2021:

2021 Public Open Source Companies:

In May, SUSE, an enterprise-class open source Linux operating system vendor, went public with a market capitalization of nearly $7 billion

In June, Confluent, the commercial company behind Apache Kafka, went public, rising 25% on its first day and surpassing $11 billion in market capitalization

In October, GitLab, an open source hosting platform, went public, with a market capitalization of $14.858 billion based on the closing price on the day of listing

In December, HashiCorp, an open source software company focused on cloud infrastructure and DevOps, went public with a market capitalization of $15.3 billion

Open Source Enterprise Financing in 2021:

In February, first-class technology OneFlow (open source deep learning framework OneFlow) completed a 50 million yuan Series A financing

In March, Shenzhen Tributary Technology API7 (based on the Apache APISIX project) completed millions of dollars in Pre-A series and Series A financing

In April, Shanghai Silicon Information Technology Kyligence (based on the Apache Kylin project) completed a $70 million Series D financing

In May, Beijing Sifei Software SphereEx (based on the Apache ShardingSphere project) completed a multi-million dollar angel round of financing (as of press time, as of press time, SphereEx completed nearly $10 million pre-A round of financing in January 2022)

In May, TaosData completed a $47 million Series B funding round

In June, Whale Technology (JingOS, an open source Linux-based operating system), received a $10 million angel round of funding from Innovation Factory

In August, Databricks, a commercial company behind big data open source project Spark and Delta Lake, raised $1.6 billion in Series H funding, and its latest valuation soared to $38 billion, just seven months after the last $1 billion Series G funding round

In September, clickHouse, an open-source OLAP analytics engine, was founded independently and received $50 million in Series A funding, with Yandex also participating

In October, Apache Pulsar-based commercial company StreamNative raised $23 million in Series A funding In November, Moby Dick Open Source (based on Apache Dolphin Scheduler) raised millions of dollars in seed round funding

In December, Cockroach Labs raised another $273 million in Series F funding, valuing it at $5 billion, and cockroach Labs had just raised $160 million in January of the same year

Open source has become the mainstream of basic software research and development

Due to the two-way choice of market and technology, open source has become the mainstream and even a must for basic software research and development, a trend that is especially evident in the field of operating systems and databases.

At the operating system level, as cloud-edge collaboration becomes the next trend in the development of computing architectures, a new demand for operating systems has emerged, that is, to be able to support diverse hardware architectures at the same time. In addition, at the end of 2020, RedHat announced that it would end support for CentOS 8 at the end of 2021, and users around the world began to try to find a suitable operating system to replace. Timely solving the risks that users may face after the withdrawal of CentOS and providing users with more choices has become the direction of the efforts of operating system manufacturers and R&D personnel, and open source has become the preferred mode of operating system research and development.

Following Huawei's open source self-developed operating system openEuler in 2019, in October 2021, the Dragon Lizard community debuted at the Alibaba Cloud Habitat Conference, and the new Dragon Lizard operating system Anolis OS also made a major appearance, and announced that it was completely open source and operated in a neutral community manner.

On November 4, 2021, Dragon Lizard announced that it will donate to the Open Atom Open Source Foundation for incubation, and the Foundation's Technical Supervision Committee has unanimously agreed to accept the Dragon Lizard Operating System as a Foundation project. On November 9, Euler officially announced the official donation to the Open Atom Open Source Foundation for incubation. At present, the OpenAnolis community has more than 50 ecological enterprises, and the openEuler community has more than 300 enterprises and nearly 10,000 community developers. After donating to the Open Atom Open Source Foundation, Intel also officially signed a contributor license agreement to join the openEuler open source community.

On December 22, 2021, open CloudOS, a domestic open source operating system community, was officially established. More than 20 operating system ecological manufacturers and users, such as Tencent, Baode, Beijing Chuxin, Beijing Hongqi, Feiteng, Inspur, Loongson Zhongke, OPPO, Advanced Open Source, CEC Keshentai, Zhongke Fangde, Zhaoxin, etc., became the first batch of founding units. At the beginning of its establishment, OpenCloudOS decided to become a neutral community without vendor labels, and in the future it will also become a member of the Open Atomic Open Source Foundation, hosted and supervised by the Foundation, operating in a standard open source community model.

At present, there are already 4 domestic open source operating system projects in the incubation projects displayed on the official website of the Open Atom Open Source Foundation, namely openEuler, OpenHarmony, TencentOS Tiny, AliOS Things, and it is expected to join the Anolis OS and OpenCloudOS in the future.

As the core basic software, the database also needs to be quickly polished and iterated with the help of open source models. In 2021, Ant Group's self-developed distributed database OceanBase and Alibaba Cloud's cloud-native distributed database PolarDB-X have successively announced open source.

"There are many application scenarios for distributed databases in China, and it is precisely because of the demand that there will be products that match this demand, and these scenarios have brought a lot of exercise and polishing to the products." The demand for the Chinese market is huge, if there is no open source, it is difficult to have a product that can support the scene outbreak of the Chinese market at the current rate of iteration and expansion. Therefore, open source is the best choice for the development of China's new generation of databases. Interviewed experts said that open source can also be used as a bridge to transmit the product characteristics precipitated by excellent developers in Internet companies to the financial industry and traditional industries.

Three unsolved questions: the future can be expected

Overall, open source is moving in a positive direction, but at the same time there are still some questions that are facing practitioners and look forward to being answered in the near future.

Question 1: Will China's local open source foundation form a new development model?

In June 2020, the Open Atom Open Source Foundation was officially established, and China finally had its first local open source foundation. In 2021, Huawei Euler, Ali Dragon Lizard, OpenCloudOS and other domestic independent and controllable operating systems have donated or announced that they will donate to the Open Atom Open Source Foundation. Some interviewed experts believe that this marks the stage of domestic open source from following foreign foundations to the stage of completely independent operation.

Compared with several major foreign mainstream foundations, the Open Atom Open Source Foundation has its particularity. Whether it is the Linux Foundation, the OpenStack Foundation or the Apache Software Foundation, it is around a large-scale platform-level core project, gathering relevant developers, vendors, and users, establishing a foundation in this context, and then incubating more new technologies and new projects based on the technical route of this core project. Usually new projects are related to the core projects of the foundation, and because there are already developers in the core ecosystem around the foundation, new technologies can be incubated faster after joining.

At the beginning of its establishment, the Open Atom Open Source Foundation did not have such a large-scale platform-level core project or core "technical route", it is currently a multi-track synchronous development, and the ecological development speed of different tracks may be different. If you have to mention a general core "technical route", it may be more like the base camp of open source basic software, but the basic software contains operating systems, databases and other technical fields, which are not so directly related to each other. This determines that the Open Atom Open Source Foundation cannot fully refer to the development model of foreign foundations, and needs to have its own characteristics.

At present, the Open Atom Open Source Foundation is still in the early stage of development, and a lot of work is still in the exploratory stage. With more large operating system open source projects joining, how will these open source projects of the same type coexist and grow within a foundation in the future? How do foundations and open source projects grow together? Will it form a new model of development? What successful open source projects can be incubated? Worth looking forward to.

Question 2: What kind of balance of interests and coexistence model will be developed between cloud vendors and open source vendors?

The ubiquity of cloud computing has disrupted nearly every industry and functional role, and the commercial open source market is no exception. The traditional open source commercialization model is that open source projects use relatively loose open source licenses, such as Apache 2.0 and MIT, and developers or vendors can package the original code and proprietary add-ons into commercial products to sell, simply retaining the source code and copyright information of the original OSS during the distribution process.

Companies such as Cloudera, Elastic, and MongoDB rely on business models that let users enjoy free and open source versions of the software, and then pay for additional enterprise features and technical support in later production applications. This commercial open source software (COSS) model performs well in the era of enterprise private infrastructure installation and operation. However, the emergence of cloud services has upended everything: cloud vendors have integrated open source software into their cloud products to bring a holistic cloud service solution to customers, which fundamentally threatens the COSS model.

At present, the conflict of interest between cloud vendors and open source vendors is still fierce, and the balance of interests and coexistence mode between cloud vendors and open source vendors needs to be explored.

Some open source vendors have tried to redefine the norms for working with cloud vendors by modifying open source licenses, but this practice often causes great controversy in the community, and the core of the dispute is whether the new agreement is really open source or not. However, this strategy is not entirely unavoidable for open source vendors. MongoDB's change to the open source protocol has also attracted great attention, and vendors such as RedHat have said that they will abandon MongoDB. For a moment, MongoDB seemed to be in deep danger. But two years later, the company is not only alive, but well alive, and its stock price has risen from less than $100 per share in 2018 to $429 per share now.

There are also some open source vendors that have adapted well to the transformation of the cloud, such as big data unicorn Databricks, many of the open source projects they lead, such as Spark and Delta Lake, have made new designs based on the cloud, and have been made into cloud services very early, through business expansion on the cloud, and have formed a good cooperative relationship with cloud vendors.

In the future, with the competition between cloud vendors and cloud vendors, and the competition between cloud vendors and open source vendors, can the open source vendors and cloud vendors eventually run into each other to explore a win-win model? Let's wait and see.

Question 3: What are the first-class open source projects that will truly have global influence in China?

The experts interviewed shared two open source trends with us:

First, the winner of open source in every area of software becomes the de facto standard for that field. In the early days, various standards were defined in each field, such as CORBA, J2EE, MQTT, AMQP, etc., and before the outbreak of the Internet, most enterprise software was built on such standards. It seems very beautiful, but it also means that the iteration of the standard is slow, and the cycle of several years is far from meeting the agile demands of the Internet architecture. At this time, Spring, Spring Boot, Dubbo, RocketMQ, Kafka, Redis, TiDB and other products appeared, each solving the core pain points of a certain field, and naturally becoming the standard in this field.

Second, cloud native is a new variable that fosters open source software innovation. We see that most of the well-known open source software in various fields on the market is designed 10 years ago, mainly running in physical data centers, designed for 100 gigabit networks, physical disks, and physical servers. At present, the IaaS of various public cloud vendors has been extremely mature, network latency, computing and storage capabilities have been greatly improved, at this time the design cornerstone of the upper Layer PaaS software has undergone a qualitative change, and there will inevitably be a new design of PaaS products based on the cloud. For example, Snowflake, Datadog, etc. are all newly designed based on the cloud and have been recognized by the majority of developers. At present, this field has just begun, There are nearly 10 million Chinese software developers, and the field of cloud computing has almost started at the same time as international first-line manufacturers, and I believe that there will be more and more first-class open source software in this field.

Both of the above trends mean that China has the potential to produce first-class open source projects with global influence, and which open source projects will stand out in the future and truly go global, I think everyone is full of curiosity and expectations.

Conclusion

There is an old saying in the open source circle: "Go alone fast, go far", whether it is for an open source project and open source community, or the development of open source in China, we should treat them as a "long run". The development of open source needs to rely on China's universities and popular open source educational institutions to transport open source talents for a long time; more importantly, it is necessary for enterprises and developers to continue to invest together to launch more forward-looking and technology-leading excellent open source projects.

In 2022, I believe that the open source circle will be more exciting, InfoQ will continue to pay attention to and report on open source people and open source things, let us witness the "open source reshaping the new ecology of software development".

Interviewees (in alphabetical order):

Huang Dongxu, co-founder and CTO of PingCAP, senior basic software engineer and architect, has worked in Microsoft Research Asia, NetEase Youdao and Pea Pod, is good at distributed system and database development, and has rich experience and unique insights in the field of distributed storage. Avid open source enthusiasts and open source software authors, founded PingCAP in 2015, designed and developed the open source NewSQL database TiDB from scratch, and now has more than 30,000 stars on GitHub.

Liang Bing, Director of Open Source and Ecological Marketing for Huawei's Computing Industry, started 20 years of IT industry marketing and ecological work after a brief dip in the embryonic period of the Internet. He has served 263.com, IBM, Intel, HUAWEI and other companies. His work career spanned: the PC e-Business era, the power full-stack closed-source minicomputer market, the X86's open source software ecosystem (Intel Open Source Technology Center), and now serving the open software ecosystem (openEuler) for diversified computing.

Li Wanpeng, Tencent Cloud expert engineer, Linux kernel KVM subsystem core Reviewer, well-known Domestic Linux kernel developers, have deep accumulation in virtualization, memory management, scheduler and other aspects, and have been invited to give lectures at well-known virtualization and kernel-related conferences at home and abroad.

Xiaorui Wang (Flower Name: Zhao Jia) is a senior technical expert at Alibaba, author and founder of Apache RocketMQ, PMC Chair, and member of the Apache Software Foundation. The first line of RocketMQ code was written in 2012 and now flows trillions of messages a day, serving tens of thousands of users on the cloud and open source users around the world. He was responsible for upgrading Taobao Tmall's core business to the cloud-native architecture, allowing applications to move from Book mode to Serverless mode.

Yan Qing, Big Data Expert of NetEase Digital Sail, Apache Kyuubi PPMC & Committer, Apache Spark Committer.