Why Open Source Looks Different in China: When Vendor Strategies, Policy Signals, and Market Pressure Converge

<p>Open source is often discussed through a familiar narrative: community-led collaboration, neutral governance, and voluntary participation driven by shared technical interests.</p> <p>However, when looking at China in 2025, open source often looks noticeably different — not because different tools are used, but because the constraints shaping them are fundamentally different.</p> <p>This talk explores how open source in China has evolved under the convergence of three forces: vendor-led engineering realities, explicit policy signals, and intense market pressure — especially under economic tightening and global uncertainty. In this environment, open source is frequently not a starting ideal, but a practical mechanism: to establish de facto standards, to gain global trust, and increasingly, to remain viable through international adoption.</p> <p>The talk examines why many projects are company-led rather than community-born, why governance often lags behind engineering, and why “going global” is less about expansion than about survival.</p> <p>The perspective offered is not representative of any state or corporation, but comes from someone who has worked between Taiwanese, Chinese, and global open source communities for over a decade. The goal is not to defend or promote a particular model, but to provide developers familiar with Western open source traditions with a clearer mental framework for understanding how open source behaves under non-ideal conditions — and what that means for future collaboration and governance in an increasingly interconnected open source world.</p>