China sets up Code Cloud Gitee as its own version of GitHub

With relations between China and USA, led by the Trump administration, becoming increasingly fractious, now is not the best time in the world for having Chinese developers dependent on a US-based resource.

China has now responded by elevating Code Cloud Gitee as its local version of Microsoft’s GitHub.

The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently launched the 2020 Open-source Hosting Platform project, a public-private partnership, with the intent to move the domestic open-source ecosystem into the fast lane.

The contract was won by a consortium consisting of 10 units from Beijing Institute of Technology and Southwest University of Science and Technology. The consortium plans to use Code Cloud Gitee to build the national Open Source Hosting Platform for China.

Code cloud Gitee already offers services to more than 5 million developers and 100,000 companies and hosts 10 million open source projects on the platform, making it the second-largest code hosting platform in the world.

HongShu, the founder of Gitee, noted Code Cloud Gitee is the result of 7 years of work, and they don’t see themselves as a replacement for Github, but rather that “the world should be a hundred flowers blooming and brilliant.”

Gitee says the development of open source is the only way for China to improve the level of the information technology industry.

“After so many years of unremitting work has been recognized, our entire company is excited about it, and at the same time, we are deeply aware of the great mission on our shoulders and we are bound to move forward more courageously,” HongShu noted.