Chinese developers fear losing open source tech to trade war

Chinese developers fear the fallout from the tech war will cost them access to GitHub

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Chinese developers say restricting GitHub would hurt open source communities everywhere. (Picture: Shutterstock)

Masha Borak

Published: 10:13pm, 24 May 2019Updated: 9:05am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Update: GitHub has responded, denying Chinese users will be affected. See GitHub's response here.

Restricted access to US technology is shaping up to have a big impact on Huawei. Now some Chinese software developers are wondering if the ongoing trade dispute between the US and China might soon affect them.

It all revolves around US-based GitHub, the world’s largest code hosting platform. Countless open source code projects are based on GitHub, allowing people from around the world to view and collaborate on projects. And as of last year, GitHub is now owned by Microsoft.

The fears started when GitHub’s export control rules caught the attention of China’s developer community. It says that content developed on GitHub needs to comply with US export laws, including the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), the same regulations used to restrict exports to Huawei and affiliated companies.

“For developers, source code is a very important resource,” said Liu Chen, director of operations for Open Source China (OSChina), which calls itself the largest open source community in China.

Fears about losing access to GitHub might be overblown. Apache Software Foundation (ASF), another US-based organization that offers open source software, published an announcement on Wednesday saying that open source software and collaboration on open source code are not subject to the EAR.