I don't think I've ever had good experience with Chinese companies. It is like 90% of the product is marketing and form, rather than function.
I bought some robotics stuff from a Chinese company. It became a paperweight because the documentation was a google drive folder that was a collection of code and random PDF files from various sources, mixed with some Chinese stuff.
The branding was a 10/10 but everything behind the scenes was 0/10, not even functional.
It has happened to me 3+ times and at this point I just try to avoid Chinese stuff when possible.
You have 3+ times bad experience with Chinese stuff, but conclude that 90% of Chinese stuff are bad, so you only purchased Chinese stuff 3.33+ times? I don't believe it. Check all your stuff, especially the ones that you consider good. You might be surprised how many of them are Chinese.
BTW, for Chinese robotics stuff, I'd recommend you check out DJI, Ubtech, Clickbot and EMO robot, just to name a few. These are well-established brands. If you just get random stuff from some random kickstarter campaigns, yeah it has a high chance of ending bad (no matter it's Chinese or not).
This website was indeed created with sorta [marketing](https://www.c114.com.cn/news/16/a1243786.html). It is an attempt by CSDN and Huawei to build an open-source platform in China, promoting their compliance of regulations.
My view is that Huawei's involvement is likely primarily aimed at helping to establish package repositories for its Harmony OS and OpenEuler (such as [ohpm](https://ohpm.openharmony.cn/#/cn/home)), which require (real-name) identity verification via mobile phone numbers for package publishing.
OP edit: title was "Every GitHub repo stolen by GitCode, platform launched by China's CSDN". Edited to "mirrored" because technically it's okay to mirror open-source projects.
* note: apparently only repos above a certain number of stars (10?) are mirrored. Title changed to "extensively mirrored"
sorry, it is not a real mirror, all the links in repo get changed when doing the 'mirroring'. it also created pages...etc all things that do not get the permission from author.
Many people are talking about how it's mirrored not stolen, and this is permitted since it's open source. Let's put legal perspective and semantics aside - cloning all of GitHub into something called GitCode (which btw straight up stole GitHub's UX) is unethical. No one running these projects is expecting a pure clone to appear en masse onto another competing site.
Eh, the vast majority of people running these projects don’t care where it’s hosted.
The reason it’s on GitLab is because it was a free and easy place to put code in the first place.
Mirroring was extremely common when the internet was slower.
There is absolutely nothing unethical here in relationship to the project owners themselves.
This possibly might be damaging to GitHub themselves but even that is a stretch.
I would be extremely surprised if you’ll find project owners that are “offended” by this for lack of a better term and have published their code explicitly on GitHub in order to support GitHub.
But it is unethical - who “owns” and manages these projects on this site? How do you even now know what code will be there, how it’s maintained, any CI, etc? How can we trust at all?
It’s one thing to fork, but then you have a different name attached to it. It’s entirely another to clone the open source world en masse with no auditable trails or connection to the original authors.
As an example, AOSC OS project owners feel offended and made a public post about it on Telegram: https://t.me/aosc_os/523.
It could disrupt the community because for issues and pull requests created on GitCode, the original maintainers are likely not going to receive any notifications and they will just be ignored.
GitCode also did not make it clear that those repos are mirrored from GitHub in an obvious way, especially on the organization or user pages, e.g. https://archive.is/su9h5. IANAL, but this looks like impersonation to me.
A sibling comment also mentioned that CSDN is publishing machine-generated blog posts about cloned projects with a link to GitCode. I believe this is even more unethical.
One interesting thing is they seem to have also cloned the number of stars each repo has on GitHub. At least that’s true for a cursory check of a few that I’ve committed to. If you click on the star count you’ll then see two separate counts for GitHub and GitCode stars.
It’s one thing to mirror the repos, but it’s another to initially misrepresent the interactivity the repo is getting, even if they’re clear about it when you dig in.
Also, how do you authenticate so you can keep committing and interact with the repo to manage PRs and issues if it’s yours?
> Developers can indeed request Gitcode to remove their projects, but this requires developers to authorize Gitcode using their Github accounts to verify their identity.
> [...] and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality
Use, display, and perform through the GitHub Service are permitted according to the GitHub ToS, but not reproduce except on GitHub, unless further rights are granted with a license.
Any repository without a LICENSE file or license grant in code or README, and I could create one in a few minutes.
GitHub and GitCode do not provide an easy way to search for these, so you will have to scrape the API and clone the repos to find out the ratio of FOSS/restrictive/no license.
I would put the topic into the editorializing category.
Cloning github repos is not "stealing"...
I haven't looked into the poster's history, but this definition of "stealing" is the exact opposite side of the coin taken by many user's who support LLM bots scraping all content on the internet.
Every user is an individual, so it's expected to have both sides of the coin expressed, but just reading this in the context of most stuff scolling through HN highlights the cocntrast.
Also, it will kindly(?) create an account corresponding to github account.
If you want to remove content from the repository it cloned, you need to login with github account, and remove content. But the account and the project will still be kept as a placeholder.
Doesn't appear like any of my public repositories have been "stolen." Not sure if I should take that as a good thing or as an offense, to be honest, lol.
The code is open source, so I wouldn't mind anyway.
True they didn't clone the repository about documenting atrocities in concentration camps. also either the systems are really struggling or the implementation is not (yet) fully functional since browsing often breaks, Wiki is missing and so on
I don't think I've ever had good experience with Chinese companies. It is like 90% of the product is marketing and form, rather than function.
I bought some robotics stuff from a Chinese company. It became a paperweight because the documentation was a google drive folder that was a collection of code and random PDF files from various sources, mixed with some Chinese stuff.
The branding was a 10/10 but everything behind the scenes was 0/10, not even functional.
It has happened to me 3+ times and at this point I just try to avoid Chinese stuff when possible.