Why China is the next proving ground for open source software Western entrepreneurs still haven't figured out China. For most, the problem is getting China to pay for software. The harder problem, however, is building software that can handle China's tremendous scale. China is not merely consuming the West's best software: It's open sourcing its own. Baidu, for example, has just announced the open sourcing of its machine learning platform, PaddlePaddle, under an Apache license. According to Li, "This is as significant as when Google open sourced its machine learning platform, Tensorflow." Baidu's action suggests a shift in how China thinks about software. In December 2014, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) declared its support for OpenStack for state-owned enterprises. Not long after, Tencent embraced the Open Daylight Foundation's SDN instead of developing its own proprietary distributed cluster SDN controller, as Neela Jacques uncovered. Across China, similar efforts to use, and increasingly contribute, open source code have flourished. Because, if you can meet China's scale demands, everything else is easy. See http://ift.tt/2cjB00G
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