Fantastic piece. The six-act structure makes twenty years of history feel like a single coherent story, which it is. The "open source ethos" concept especially: that combination of utopian belief in positive-sum contribution and a fierce drive to prove Chinese developers on the world stage. That didn't come from nowhere, and you've traced exactly where it came from.
What struck me reading this is that robotics is now entering the same arc. Unitree open-sourced its humanoid SDK and priced robots at levels that make hardware accessible the way GitHub made code collaboration accessible. AgiBot is releasing open datasets for robot manipulation. These companies are still mostly in your Act I, takers and consumers adapting open-source AI models for physical systems. But the transition to Act III, creators and contributors, is happening fast. And just like the software story, the companies that build open ecosystems around their hardware will outpace the ones that try to keep everything proprietary.
The BYD D++ mention is a nice early signal of this. A car company open-sourcing its sensor and controller stack in 2018 was ahead of its time. The robotics industry is only now catching up to that instinct.
Would love to see a follow-up that extends this arc into physical AI and robotics. That might be where Act VII gets written.
Great historical overview! I haven't seen any more in-depth writing on how Chinese companies are using open source software to break into high-value western industrial tech sectors, which are dominated by legacy, closed-source software? Examples include RISC-V adoption (over intel/arm), Huawei open sourcing CAD kernels (over siemens/autodesk), OpenHarmony (instead of ios/android), EDA software (rather than cadence/synopsys), Huawei's CANN (instead of CUDA), etc
Some piece on China's open source as industrial strategy would be interesting to see!
A real Open Source mobile phone system that is totally de-Googlefied (unlike Android) sounds great. It would be nice if other Chinese mobile phone manufacturers were to adopt the Huawei open source version so that there is an open standard vs desktop and cloud interconnectivity.
Brilliant article Kevin!
Fantastic piece. The six-act structure makes twenty years of history feel like a single coherent story, which it is. The "open source ethos" concept especially: that combination of utopian belief in positive-sum contribution and a fierce drive to prove Chinese developers on the world stage. That didn't come from nowhere, and you've traced exactly where it came from.
What struck me reading this is that robotics is now entering the same arc. Unitree open-sourced its humanoid SDK and priced robots at levels that make hardware accessible the way GitHub made code collaboration accessible. AgiBot is releasing open datasets for robot manipulation. These companies are still mostly in your Act I, takers and consumers adapting open-source AI models for physical systems. But the transition to Act III, creators and contributors, is happening fast. And just like the software story, the companies that build open ecosystems around their hardware will outpace the ones that try to keep everything proprietary.
The BYD D++ mention is a nice early signal of this. A car company open-sourcing its sensor and controller stack in 2018 was ahead of its time. The robotics industry is only now catching up to that instinct.
Would love to see a follow-up that extends this arc into physical AI and robotics. That might be where Act VII gets written.
Fascinating piece!
Great historical overview! I haven't seen any more in-depth writing on how Chinese companies are using open source software to break into high-value western industrial tech sectors, which are dominated by legacy, closed-source software? Examples include RISC-V adoption (over intel/arm), Huawei open sourcing CAD kernels (over siemens/autodesk), OpenHarmony (instead of ios/android), EDA software (rather than cadence/synopsys), Huawei's CANN (instead of CUDA), etc
Some piece on China's open source as industrial strategy would be interesting to see!
A real Open Source mobile phone system that is totally de-Googlefied (unlike Android) sounds great. It would be nice if other Chinese mobile phone manufacturers were to adopt the Huawei open source version so that there is an open standard vs desktop and cloud interconnectivity.