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Pranay: My hypothesis that what has happened in China is a combination of three things: human capital meets competitive advantage meets creative insecurity.

Human capital. As Kailash was saying, a lot of things are happening in that space. And India and China probably have both capital developing human capital and contributing products there. 

The second element is competitive advantage. Historically, when a hegemon exists in a system, that hegemon will always try to uphold the status quo, whereas the challenger will try to break the status quo.

In this case, the hegemon is the US.

When UK was the power, Germany and the US adopted various ways… Back then, it was breaking intellectual property, right? 

This time, the strategy if you want to quickly develop some product is to get open-source. It will give you that advantage in this decade, which you wouldn’t have gotten if Alibaba had done things on its own in a closed ecosystem. 

A lot of such initiatives was how (China could) catch up with the US companies quickly. 

And one way was to do things in the open.

The digital exports of China are perceived negatively in the world. Now, we have other perceptions… like there might be backdoors and things like that. And such perceptions exist whether it is true or not.

When you are building in the open, that is one way to challenge that.

The third element is creative insecurity.

Now, this comes from the politics of innovation literature. There is a great book on this by Mark Taylor, in which he says that when the sum total of external threats exceeds the sum total of internal divisions, nation states tend to invest in R&D, innovation, and other things.

So, China felt that creative insecurity. First 2019, the Trump restrictions, and then another incident where Github suspended accounts for people in Syria and other stuff.

[…]

I think all three fell in place for China. 

We did not feel the creative insecurity as much as China did.

Kailash: Software is really unbounded. Your only limitations are skills, time, experience, and imagination.

As a 13-year-old, I was sitting in my bedroom, writing open-source software,  publishing it on the internet, and finding users globally.

That was true 25 years ago; that is a million times more true today.

So, software in that sense is limitless.

All you need is the internet, passionate people, and time.

How did we miss that bus?

I think it’s cultural.

I think in all these examples that we’ve discussed, the recurring theme is Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba.

It’s the industry that catapulted open-source as a thing there.

All the individuals who still write most of the open-source software in the world work for tech companies.

Companies indirectly, whether they know it or not, have a really strong impact on what happens in the local open-source ecosystem.

If a tech startup in Bengaluru has a management that understands the philosophy of open-source—that understands the strategic value, forget philosophy—and they encourage their engineers to contribute little things, that is how it really starts.

Now imagine that happening across a large number of companies in China.

What you end up having then are these developers who are encouraged to contribute outwards. They’ll form small little communities, there’ll be tons of communities, there’ll be small little overlaps, you’ll end up opening an ecosystem…

And that is where it starts snowballing.