The use of software, platforms and services between the USA and China is becoming increasingly difficult. Reasons for these difficulties are among others political pressure but also guidelines and threatening actions. With Gitee, an alternative to the American GitHub is now being promoted by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
Gitee and GitHub – The open source sources
Open Source is a topic in IT security that is becoming increasingly popular. We also report a lot about Open Source projects, because they are very important for IT security. By publishing their own source code, the manufacturer enables further development at this code base. Besides the possibility to develop further, many IT security researchers can look at the code and find security holes.
One of the last contributions we published regarding Open Source was about Troy Hunt, one of the most popular IT security websites, now wanting to make Open Source.
The portal on which most open source projects are located is called GitHub and belongs to the company Microsoft. According to Wikipedia, the portal has about 40 million members in August 2019. We as a company are also represented on GitHub and manage some of the projects we have made open source.
The Chinese counterpart to GitHub is called Gitee and offers basically similar features to GitHub. These features include an issue tracker, which is there to report bugs in the source code and see who reported them. Gitee is now funded by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and currently contains about 10 million repositories.
These million repositories include the code for HarmonyOS and OpenEuler. Both programs are components of the operating system, which Huawei wants to develop as an Android alternative.
Conflict between the USA and China
The recent past has shown once again that it is not so easy for Chinese users to use all programs and services from the USA. One of the main reasons for this is the political pressure being exerted in China.
We reported that the editor Notepad++ is no longer available in China, because this editor has worked for oppressed people in China and Hong Kong. In order for China to be able to do without American services even more, the country is promoting a GitHub alternative with Gitee.
