The chromium example is wild. There's an extreme distrust and contempt for chromium becoming the defacto browser and therefore Google becoming the defacto gatekeeper of the web.

I mean, I expect Google open-sourced those projects because they see economic benefit to themselves in doing so, not because they are good-hearted.

Chromium is an especially silly example to use: they benefit by controlling the web platform, and open-sourcing Chromium has allowed them to get their web engine into many other browsers.

There is a lot of distrust against Google and Microsoft here, also when they opensource stuff, and Chromium and AOSP are great counterexamples.

Scroll the front page. Find literally any story that has to do with a major US tech company. Open the comment section. Look at the the top comment. It will be negative. Most of the other top comments as well. Trying to gaslight us into not believing our own eyes ..

I'll supply such a comment: Any software open sourced by any for-profit company, including Google, is a calculated move ultimately intended to increase their bottom line, and it's naive to think otherwise.

Chromium and Kubernetes do have their business function. Tensorflow had a business function but it failed.

So Google is not a great counter example.

> There is clearly an anti-China bias here.

Yes.

> Show me comments demonstrating the same level of distrust against Google for open-sourcing projects like Tensorflow, Kubernetes, Flutter, Chromium, etc.

There's a search bar at the bottom of the page. Most people, including me, detest google and think of them as a thoroughly dishonest and sleazy organization. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to not boost China for a moment in order to accuse you of dishonest rhetoric.

It's almost insane that you've posted "comments demonstrating the same level of distrust against Google for open-sourcing [...] Chromium[...]" as if that's not a hobby for thousands of people (including me.)

edit: this has got to be a submarine shill account: 226 karma in 10 years. If this is true, pleas stop. China is doing a good enough job that they don't need it.

There must be some Alibaba posters who could clarify this. I think it’s like how Amazon pushed AWS, alibaba is hoping create a similar ecosystem. I wouldn’t conflate them with the CPC or other more niche players like deepseek.

Well of course nobody believes that, there are a large number of great Chinese open source projects, and plenty of great Chinese contributors to open source projects. I have zero doubts that Chinese people are at least equally as capable of embracing open source as anyone else. It would be strange to suggest otherwise.

That said, though, I do have trouble believing the long-term story for open weights, anywhere. We do not need an evil government for open weight to "make sense", but I do think we need some government involvement for open weight to make sense in the long run. Otherwise, it's not 100% clear how they could be sustainable, and I don't think massive companies really can be trusted to just be philanthropic with no incentives indefinitely (or really, much at all to begin with.)

Chinese models being open weight does help them gain some Western mindshare, whereas for obvious reasons Americans would be very suspicious of running their source code and prompts through Chinese providers. (And I think that's justified, I just also think that American providers aren't really that much better in the long run, and you should prefer to not have to go through any provider for true privacy.)

Sir, this is a multi-billion dollar operation. There have to be some incentives.

Did the GP actually say that? I think you're putting words into their mouth.

They specifically referenced the actions of the Chinese government, as well as mentions of IP theft. I don't think that covers 1.5 billion people. More like a few thousand or tens of thousands?

It will be a great day for China and the world when the Chinese people are free from a totalitarian dictatorship. But until then we have to speak of the policy of the Chinese government as the policy of China, even if many, or most disagree with those policies.

when the CCP controls media, news, corporations, they basically control the minds of their people. How do you suppose the Wuhan virus got so out of control? You mean to tell me anybody in China can say bad words about the government and their leaders, bookstore owners/employees are not getting arrested for selling books, students are not getting arrested for sharing their opinions, women are not forced abortions and sterilizations for the one child policy?

But that’s not what they said?

It's hilarious seeing you hear a complaint about the CCP and Chinese tech bros and think it's applied to every citizen.

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The U.S. was openly a pirate nation for most of the 1800s.

Like with the ICC, the US respects or doesn’t respect international law strictly when it’s beneficial to the state’s interests. China really can’t be held to a different standard. This activity is grade school level geopolitics: the global system of government is anarchy.

Agents of American companies who don't mind 15 years in the federal pen do it to American companies. So it must be right.

The only way that's an inconsistency is if you think all Uyghurs are terrorists.