From Google to Facebook, to Microsoft, Instagram, Netflix and many others, have many parts of them either created or aided by open-source technology.
What this means, many of them were at least made from contributions on GitHub, the popular platform that provides hosting for software development acquired by Microsoft in 2018.
While GitHub is the largest host of source code in the world, it does have competitors.
And one of them, is called Gitee.
Gitee is a Chinese version of GitHub, made for Chinese developers as a platform to rely on to build the country's high tech industry.
But with the tension between the U.S. and China, where companies like Huawei are being cut off from their American tech peers, China is seeing Gitee as the GitHub alternative for its future tech.
Read: U.S. Vs. China: Google Pulls Huawei's Android Licence
Platforms like GitHub allow anyone the free access to open source projects, where they can use and collaborate with other developers around the world.
Through GitHub, developers can use the projects hosted on its platform as they see fit. In a survey among 950 global IT leaders, conducted by enterprise open source software company Red Hat, 95% said open source was strategically important for them.
Since the tension between the U.S. and China, the broader geopolitical disputes have made internet users and clients feel their fair share of pain.
Due to concerns about the U.S. in cutting off its Chinese developers from GitHub's massive trove of software, this is where Gitee is taking its role.
"If China does not have its own open-source community to maintain and manage source codes, our domestic software industry will be very vulnerable to uncontrollable factors," once said Huawei executive Wang Chenglu at an event, shortly after GitHub acted to comply with U.S. sanctions laws.
Run by Open Source China (OSChina), the Shenzhen-based firm behind the open-source community, Gitee calls itself the largest open source community in the country.
It began back in July, when China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) instructed Gitee to construct an “independent, open-source code hosting platform for China,” the company said in a blog post.
MIIT then announced the bidding results of the "2020 Open Source Hosting Platform Project", led by Shenzhen Aosi Network Technology (Open Source China), and the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center, the Fifth Institute of Electronics of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China Electronics Standardization Institute, Huawei, Qi'anxin Technology Group, Inspur Electronic Information Industry, and Suzhou Prism Colorful Information Technology.
A consortium consisting of 10 units from Beijing Institute of Technology and Southwest University of Science and Technology won the bid for this project.
The consortium agreed that they will rely on Gitee to build an independent open source hosting platform in China.
This followed GitHub, which started cutting off certain services from users in U.S.-sanctioned countries, including Iran, Syria and Crimea, which caused outrage and panic in the global developer community.
So with Gitee, China wants to ensure continued collaboration in order to maintain the key characteristic of open source, at least for developers in the country.
"Now that the open source business has gained national support," the blog post wrote, Gitee can start supporting "domestic developers, providing them with a larger platform to display their talents, and accelerating innovation through open source, the development of domestic open source and the level of the information technology industry."
Chinese developers started to fear about the tension, since they realize that they content hosted on GitHub needs to comply with U.S. export laws, including the Export Administration Regulations (EAR).
These are the same regulations previously used to restrict exports to Huawei, its affiliate companies, and some other Chinese companies. Through the regulations, the U.S. has made GitHub restrict some countries from accessing its Enterprise Server, including developers in Iran and North Korea, which are both under U.S. trade sanctions.
So here, China is trying to make Gitee its alternative to GitHub.
In the meantime, Gitee has around 5 million developers working on 10 million repositories for 100,000 countries. This is pale in comparison to GitHub, which has more than 40 million developers and about 100 million repositories.
While GitHub at this time has no plan on leaving its Chinese developers, the company is still required to comply to regulation and can be controlled by the governing powers of the U.S..
Before it ever happens, Gitee knows that its local developers may prefer to use Chinese language in their work. And this is where the platform is there to help.
“The world should be one where a hundred flowers bloom. The foreign market has GitHub and other kinds of foundations. In China, there are various organizations dedicated to evangelizing open source software, as well as Gitee,” wrote OSChina's founder who goes by the name Hongshu, showing his confident that there is a market for the GitHub alternative.
"An open-source ecosystem can’t be built overnight. It’s a process of building a tower with sand. We have faith in the innovative power of Chinese developers. We also believe in our perseverance and strength to strive."