Cool, now can China invest in fixing 1000 upstream bugs in Gnome, KDE, Wayland, Pipewire, LibreOffice, NextCloud, Firefox, and so on? Also, could they develop open source drives and firmware for all the hardware they are exporting? I am not sarcastic. I just wonder why all this big players that use Linux create an own Distribution, but beside from that, not doing much.
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2022
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It's probably because those with decision making authority have no idea what open source is and how it works.
That being said, China is a huge contributor to open source. For example Huawei and Alibaba are among top kernel contributors.
Hwawei has been called out for KPI farming on the Linux kernel (i.e. lots of bogus contributions to boost their support numbers): https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/18/153
There's some more insight on this Hackernews thread where an ex-Samsung employee defends Hwawei and notes it's not intentionally KPI farming, but rather poor internal performance tools.
I would gladly be proven wrong, but a quick Google search doesn't discuss any concrete contributions Hwawei makes (only Git simple git diff metrics, which fall under the discussions linked above)
Huawei is not the only one. Almost all software companies have some KPI that employees are farming. (speaking from experience here)
Big Tech companies probably do more KPI boosting than Huawei does, but Huawei is bad because China bad. It always comes down to this, because those racists can never be racist enough, and always play to the tune of whatever their favourite news channel or political party teaches them.
If this is about the KPI boosting or backdoor, then this is misinformation. I wrote about this a couple years ago. https://np.reddit.com/r/privatelife/comments/gjjobm/writeup_controversy_about_huawei_allegedly_trying/