China has chosen to use Gitee to build an "independent, open source hosting platform", a decision made public in the results of a tender for the "2020 Open Source Hosting Platform Project" announced by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on July 14.
The project will be led by Open Source China, a consortium headquartered in Shenzhen.
The hosting service is backed by the government, as well as several universities and private companies, including Huawei.
Founded seven years ago, Gitee has served more than 5 million developers and 100,000 companies.
The platform hosts more than 10 million open source projects, including many of the best-known ones in China, making it China's leading code hosting platform and the second largest in the world.
However, Gitee is still far behind the world's most famous open source community, GitHub, which reported last November that it has 100 million repositories and about 31 million developers worldwide.
Gitee says that developing open source is the only way for China to improve its IT industry.
They don't see themselves as a replacement for Github, but rather as "a world where everything blossoms and blooms."
Last July, the Microsoft-owned GitHub cut off certain services to users in countries sanctioned by the US including Iran, Syria, and Crimea, causing outrage and panic in the global developer community.
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