Chapter 379 GIT and Entrepreneurs

Ugly country, San Francisco, Silicon Valley.

On the west coast of the United States, there is a very famous city among Chinese people called San Francisco. This is actually a real Chinese title. His actual name is "San Francisco", which directly translates to a personal name, "San Francisco".

The Chinese generally call it San Francisco or San Francisco. This name comes from the gold rush in the early years. There is really a gold mountain here.

Now, there is a particularly famous cross-sea bridge here called the "Golden Gate Bridge". When it comes to Ugly Country, besides the Statue of Liberty and Capitol Hill, this may be the most famous landmark building.

The Golden Gate Bridge is a cross-sea bridge, but its length is not that long because it is actually the entrance to a long and narrow bay. The coast of this bay is the famous Bay Area.

Since the 1960s, various high-tech companies have been gathering here. They first gathered near the Santa Clara Valley. Because most of them are engaged in semiconductors, and the main material of semiconductors is silicon, so this place is called Silicon Valley.

Later, high-tech companies gradually spread nearby and occupied the entire Bay Area, forming a high-tech urban agglomeration composed of three large cities: San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, and many small cities in between.

For more than half a century, countless technology-based companies were founded, grew, and died here. The history here can almost become a condensed history of China’s electronic information industry.

John had just driven his newly purchased Cadillac to Los Altos in Silicon Valley. This was a private house he rented with his friends, where they started their careers.

Like countless entrepreneurs, two young men had an idea and then made a product. The two of them pooled some money together. The product was software, which was based on an open source project on GIT that they came into contact with at Stanford University.

GIT is a magical treasure house. Almost any software product you can think of has open source code that can be used.

It's just that the operating system used by these open source codes is not compatible with the IBM series and Apple's Macintosh series used daily, so the entry barrier is high.

And they are all written by amateurs. The smell of GEEK is too strong. All software products are straightforward and go straight to the core. There is almost no friendly human-computer interaction. There are many functions that even require long commands to access. accomplish.

For people in the computer industry, this thing is of course extremely convenient. You can use all the library resources here very conveniently, and you can complete an amazing task with just a few lines of commands.

But if you are not a computer major, but a professional in other fields who want to use these functions, the user experience will be a torment.

The most interesting thing is that the open source agreements here are different from traditional ones. Just like some open source agreements that Stanford already has, although they are free of charge, they require that things developed based on this code must still be open source.

This suddenly interrupts the possibility of commercializing this code, and the open source agreement on GIT is simply too free. That is, you can use it casually, whether for home, community or commercial use. Whether the things you continue to develop are open source , also casual.

The only stipulation is that if you use it for business and make money from it, you can just pay a proportion of the profit, and the total amount should not exceed 20% of sales.

This is very interesting. The two of them consulted lawyers. Such an agreement is almost equivalent to no agreement. If you don't want to pay, there are ways to get around it. Just say that your company is not profitable. Isn't this easy?

Of course, they also have the only countermeasure, that is, if you really don't submit it at all, then they can vote you into the blacklist and no longer allow you to use this open source code.

But there is actually a way around it. As long as you don't go too far, no one will probably pay attention to you. Generally speaking, companies only need a small amount of communication, and the foundation can be supported to further develop. Even capitalists will consider long-term matters.

The general manager of GIT is an open source community organization with a non-profit nature. The organization is registered in Switzerland. Its members include dozens of universities in China, more than a dozen research institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and more than a dozen universities in China. Members It's quite complicated.

The board of directors is established by people from these universities and changes every year, and the organization will also leave some directorships to large companies for donations or companies that contribute to major open source projects.

All financial and legal affairs have been entrusted to a well-known accounting firm in the United States. They are responsible for complex calculations and allocations. Of course, most of the funds are actually used to maintain the GIT open source community itself. What can be used Dividends are few and far between.

When it comes to each project, it is even more diverse. There are not only project contributors, but also project initiators, entrusters, undertakers, investors, and donors. It is a mess.

It makes people feel that there are no rules here. What is freedom? Translate translation, what is freedom? This is it.

Of course, Wang Xu did it on purpose. These codes were used for fishing. They didn't even use bait, they were straight hooks.

Except for a few core projects, although most of the projects and products were initially developed by Chinese universities, once contributors from all over the world began to contribute, it became a truly global operation. of.

Wang Xu controls all these projects, including operating systems, development languages, development tools, and basic components of network communications. Even though these things don't make money, they still have to keep adding money.

How could Wang Xu, who came from the future, be bothered by such immediate interests? The main point here is free, and this thing is recognized by the whole world.

This thing is the industry standard. He says that he supports a certain standard, and that standard can make hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.

For example, the operating system is arranged for the new wireless communication standard he has developed. The subsequent various wireless peripherals have a basis immediately. Readers may not understand this, but if I tell you that it is called "Bluetooth", everyone will understand.

Third-rate companies make products, second-rate companies make brands, and first-rate companies make standards. Wang Xu directly made a top-rate one. What he wants to do is to be the one who chooses the standard.

So, he attaches great importance to open source products and the open source community. Even if he has been losing money, he is constantly investing.

In fact, given the current scale, Wang Xu no longer needs to invest money. This is a gold mine that everyone can dig. Don't treat others as fools. Everyone has ways to make money from these piles of code.

Now even IBM, Microsoft and Oracle have joined the board of directors of GIT. They all donated tens of millions of US dollars to join. Are they stupid? How is it possible?

In the current open source community, due to the participation of a large number of Western universities, mirror sites are expanding rapidly at a rate of one per month. Xiao Ri Zi and Li Jia Po in Asia, Hans Country, Tulip Country, Fu Country and Gaul Country in Europe all have their own mirror sites.

The University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Carolina in the Ugly Country have also established mirror sites, bringing the total number of mirror sites in the Ugly Country to four, surpassing China to become the country with the most mirror sites.

China still has only two mirror sites, the Shuimu University main site in the imperial capital and the Jiaotong University mirror site in the Magic City. On the one hand, it is a funding issue. Building a mirror site still requires a lot of computer resources, and the price is not low. In addition, the network construction is relatively complete only in the east, and the western region is still eating dirt.

What? You ask how the original data is synchronized? Of course, planes carry CDs and hard disks, and trucks carry CDs and hard disks. This is the communication method with the largest bandwidth in the foreseeable future.

Open source is like Pandora's box. Once it is opened, no one can control it. Wang Xu wants to disrupt the software ecology of the whole world. You want to make money, no problem, but you want to monopolize?

Hey, there are free ones here, and companies will use these codes to rise and crush you in a minute.

You said that Wang Xu has been tossing this for almost two years. Has he gained anything? Of course, and the gains are huge. Apart from other things, the mathematical library has almost been established, and the underlying libraries of physics, chemistry, and biology are also rapidly taking shape with the efforts of universities around the world.

Even in more subdivided fields, for example, the music processing software that Wang Xu developed in the early stage, the acoustic calculation in it is an independent project, and now it has become the favorite basic library of many scientists studying this field.

These things are not things that can be done by closed-door research. China does not have so many scientists to do these things now. But there are many overseas scholars, especially when open source has become the benchmark of scientific freedom on the Internet.

Once you start, naturally someone will continue to add bricks and tiles, and even go out with independent projects, forming a form of almost unlimited expansion.

There are already many kinds of mathematical software packages based on this. This is the early days of the Internet, when the enthusiasm of various participants has not been wiped out. Many packages have even started open source projects, and everyone works together to improve a certain package.

For example, a package specifically used for computational fluid dynamics is an open source project initiated by MIT in the United States. At least in Wang Xu's opinion, if you take it and modify it, it can be used to design airplanes and ships.

And who will gain the most from these things? The United States? Of course, they have countless scientists who can understand, use, and even improve these things, but they will also lose control of these professional software.

And if we talk about the people who are most capable of learning in the world, it must be China. Wang Xu once explained the details of this with Director Jiang, and finally made the top understand that such a chaotic situation is the best situation for China, which is good at guerrilla warfare and interspersed.

Since we know our national conditions, we cannot make money from this. If so, then don't make money from this. Just roll up your sleeves. Who is China afraid of?

Your ugly country has defeated almost all software companies in China by piracy. Well, I will directly provide free software and roll up your market in return. You can't complain because your own universities have contributed more than China.

So, although GIT has only been in the West for a short year, its explosive power and potential have already made countless people eager to move, and countless pioneers have directly copied their weapons and started to work.

In the past, open source actually went through a very long gestation period, and gradually entered daily life from the professional field. One of the core reasons was the obstacles caused by various different license systems.

Many types of licenses are not allowed to be commercialized, and some that allow commercialization require a license fee to be paid in advance, and the price is not cheap.

But all these were broken by Wang Xu's almost completely free license, and he even created a model of using first and then paying after making money. This is the model adopted by many underlying engine products in later generations. If it is something developed by oneself, the initial cost will obviously be very high.

But Wang Xu is different here. He made full use of China's own cheap labor. Don't feel ashamed. This is the reality. Whether it is a low-level migrant worker or a senior professor in China, Wang Xu's eyes are cheap labor, including himself.

But it is this cheapness, coupled with his own understanding of the complete product and his familiarity with the structure of software products, that allows him to complete a feat that seems incredible to outsiders with relatively little investment.

That is, he almost turned the product line of the entire software industry upside down by himself. It's not the same or two, but almost all the commercial products you can think of, he has taken out similar open source products.

Then almost all of them were thrown out at once. Companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, AutoDesk, and Borland almost unified the domestic commodity market by allowing crazy piracy in China.

What is taught in universities and used in the market are all their products, which leads to an incomplete dependence. After that, whether it is promoting standards, selling hardware, or even directly suing, you can make a lot of money.

At the critical moment, they will cut off the supply and ask you if you will obey or not. But in this life, Wang Xu will be Sun Wukong and make a big fuss in the Heavenly Palace to show you whether the ugly Chinese people who pursue freedom can withstand this truly free software.

Wang Xu doesn’t know what the future will be like, but judging from the current feedback, the situation is very good.

It’s not just good. Wang Xu has seen many packaged versions, distribution versions, various languages, and various styles. Most of them choose to continue to open source. These are generally local versions made by universities in various places.

But there are also quite a few that only make things like introduction pages in GIT, which are not really open source, but provide product downloads.

GIT originally provided this service and allowed users to give star reviews, but such projects cannot apply for too much storage space. If the downloaded version is too large, additional fees need to be paid.

But this is also equivalent to reserving a place for these products to advertise, so most open source derivative products will retain this advertisement on GIT, so this has become a place for Wang Xu and GIT to collect intelligence.

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(Also, I wrote 8K today, I am a little bit floating)