I don't think I've ever had good experience with Chinese companies. It is like 90% of the product is marketing and form, rather than function.
I bought some robotics stuff from a Chinese company. It became a paperweight because the documentation was a google drive folder that was a collection of code and random PDF files from various sources, mixed with some Chinese stuff.
The branding was a 10/10 but everything behind the scenes was 0/10, not even functional.
It has happened to me 3+ times and at this point I just try to avoid Chinese stuff when possible.
BTW, for Chinese robotics stuff, I'd recommend you check out DJI, Ubtech, Clickbot and EMO robot, just to name a few. These are well-established brands. If you just get random stuff from some random kickstarter campaigns, yeah it has a high chance of ending bad (no matter it's Chinese or not).
My view is that Huawei's involvement is likely primarily aimed at helping to establish package repositories for its Harmony OS and OpenEuler (such as [ohpm](https://ohpm.openharmony.cn/#/cn/home)), which require (real-name) identity verification via mobile phone numbers for package publishing.
* note: apparently only repos above a certain number of stars (10?) are mirrored. Title changed to "extensively mirrored"
It's extremely distasteful and should be shamed.
The reason it’s on GitLab is because it was a free and easy place to put code in the first place.
Mirroring was extremely common when the internet was slower.
There is absolutely nothing unethical here in relationship to the project owners themselves.
This possibly might be damaging to GitHub themselves but even that is a stretch.
I would be extremely surprised if you’ll find project owners that are “offended” by this for lack of a better term and have published their code explicitly on GitHub in order to support GitHub.
It’s one thing to fork, but then you have a different name attached to it. It’s entirely another to clone the open source world en masse with no auditable trails or connection to the original authors.
It could disrupt the community because for issues and pull requests created on GitCode, the original maintainers are likely not going to receive any notifications and they will just be ignored.
GitCode also did not make it clear that those repos are mirrored from GitHub in an obvious way, especially on the organization or user pages, e.g. https://archive.is/su9h5. IANAL, but this looks like impersonation to me.
A sibling comment also mentioned that CSDN is publishing machine-generated blog posts about cloned projects with a link to GitCode. I believe this is even more unethical.
It’s one thing to mirror the repos, but it’s another to initially misrepresent the interactivity the repo is getting, even if they’re clear about it when you dig in.
Also, how do you authenticate so you can keep committing and interact with the repo to manage PRs and issues if it’s yours?
https://www.landiannews.com/archives/104677.html
Some users have reported that despite authorizing through GitHub, they are still unable to claim their namespace.
> [...] and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality
Use, display, and perform through the GitHub Service are permitted according to the GitHub ToS, but not reproduce except on GitHub, unless further rights are granted with a license.
Let's see. https://github.com/Good-Luck-CSDN/OSS-License-With-Unlimited...
Cloning github repos is not "stealing"...
I haven't looked into the poster's history, but this definition of "stealing" is the exact opposite side of the coin taken by many user's who support LLM bots scraping all content on the internet.
Every user is an individual, so it's expected to have both sides of the coin expressed, but just reading this in the context of most stuff scolling through HN highlights the cocntrast.
It will crawl tech articles from other places, use LLM to copy one, and use gitcode url to replace github url.
Found a tweet: https://x.com/yihong0618/status/1776783712954581173/photo/1
If you want to remove content from the repository it cloned, you need to login with github account, and remove content. But the account and the project will still be kept as a placeholder.
The code is open source, so I wouldn't mind anyway.
But it's open sauce, right? Mine are Apache, so this is fine?
As long as I can log in with "hunter2" as my password, it's definitely all fine. %-P
GitHub and GitCode do not provide an easy way to search for these, so you will have to scrape the API and clone the repos to find out the ratio of FOSS/restrictive/no license.
My repos had their open source license available, so I guess we'll need to wait to see actual examples of illicit copies.
I wonder what they do with the user accounts though, might I be able to access it somehow? Or someone else..