Opinion: Open Source vs. "Open Source"
The debate if Deepseek is truly open source rests often on the understanding of the Chinese software environment and if "Open Source" means truly open, or just "free".
What a lot of observers from outside of China sometimes fail to understand is, how closed the Chinese digital eco system is.
Since the rise of Deepseek, there are tons of often unqualified social media commentators that cheers the step that China goes all in on open source. The implication often is, that China is more open and more benevolent in its digital operations then the US or European counterparts. Spoiler: Deepseek’s open source nature is not so open source after all.
I am not going into the defense of the digital eco system born out of the US, as many of the latest developments are not particularly suited for the future that I would like to see.
Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and a plethora of other companies are so interested in locking in their user base to milk them for profit in a walled garden, that it hinders future oriented development in my view.
Yes, Deepseek is giving OpenAI ( and all the other LLM providers ) a run for their money and they have created a competitive system that is especially far cheaper to use fand far more accessible to the masses ( it is very capable good ).
But to turn around and declare the Chinese model as a good alternative with the idea of “open systems” in mind is just dishonest in my opinion.
First, lets take a look at some of the recent developments that might have spawned some cheerful minutes in the open source crowd.
About two years ago, the Chinese central government has initiated a push for their institutions to adopt Kylin Linux. A local “flavor” of Linux, has been in development for a while, but seems to have reached a point where people feel comfortable in rolling it out on production environments.
You see, a majority of Chinese administrative offices are still running on some version of Windows. There is even a specialized version for the Chinese government, a “government edition” of Win 10. Though outside of government circles those Windows copies in China are often pirated and are a serious security concern. Despite that it makes China dependent on US companies like. As the Chinese government understands too well, this dependency can be exploited and used to apply pressure. Naturally Beijing felt exposed on that front after the whole Huawei situation.
Talking about Huawei, lets see what they have done after they lost access to the “open source” Android.
The company developed its own Operating System, called HarmonyOS. Based on the open source Android ( ASOP ) and some Linux kernel elements, it was lauded and cheered as a true open source alternative to Android or even iOS. And if you did not know a lot about China and just looked at the press releases, it could come across this way.
Unfortunately this new miracle would not hold forever. The end game for Huawei was never to provide a boundless, open OS. Where people could sideload willy nilly stuff onto their phones. They introduced HarmonyOS NEXT. A pretty closed off system, that does not allow side loading Android apps nor is it compatible.
Now, lets look at the every day internet experience in China.
I guess I don’t need to go into the elements of the Great Firewall (GFW), online censorship and all that jazz in this article. If that is all uncharted territory for you, better read up on it here.
The reality is, that in China, most ever-day internet activities for most citizens are done via only a handful of web apps. Weibo, WeChat, DouYin ( TikTok ), Xiaohongshu and a couple more.
All this apps belong to a handful of rather big companies, which are in turn heavily monitored and quasi-content-controlled by the regulators and state elements. They can be integrated into each other, to keep the user in this tightly controlled eco-system of Chinese apps. The rest is walled off by the GFW.
None of those tools are open source by any definition. It is also almost impossible to sign up anonymously as 90% of al the services are tied to a cellphone number that is registered with your real name and ID data. There is a lively illegal market for illegal WeChat accounts etc. but to most normal users, that is a bridge too far.
The irony is though, that many software developers in China are highly reliant on Open Source products in return. Github is still an essential repository many Chinese software developers have access to, it is not blocked by the GFW. That in turn has lead to at times weird situations, where Chinese activists have used Github to publish censored information .
The owner of the site, Microsoft, tries to keep such occurrences under control, aiding the Chinese censorships machine in its efforts, but Github is still too vital for the Chinese government, its teaching institutions and companies, to actually shut it out. Sometimes they block certain repositories, but never the whole domain access.
I have to say though, that some very good tools are done by Chinese Open Source developers, who gifted the world some of the great tools on online-censorship-evation, like Shadowsocks, Fast Reverse Proxy etc. At times to great personal risk as a police visit might be always around the corner for them.
That said, the whole China-Net bubble is a very closed off ecosystem, where news flows, web use in general and online behavior is very tailored to the Chinese circumstances. That means, that an average Chinese online user, has a complete different understanding of how the internet works.
Often they struggle to operate outside this guard rails. Just the variety of web apps you have use in western countries, to emulate the same functionality of WeChat for example is for many ordinary Chinese just bewildering and unnecessary complicated.
The Chinese government has quickly understood that comfort can be used to built a fence. They work hard in corralling the user base more and more into this closed off world. Not just by using an increasingly powerful firewall system but by sheer conditioning of what tools to rely on to operate online. The bonus is, that most Chinese don’t even feel they are missing out. They have everything they need, in a way that is incredibly comfortable in their daily ( online ) life.
Under this circumstances it is totally preposterous to think, that China has a true motivation to go all in on true “Open Source” in a way it was intended by people like Linus Torvalds etc. Open Source means often just “free”.
Think about that, before you read all this “raving” articles and op-eds that celebrate DeepSeek’s “open source success”.