“To be honest, many domestic enterprises have not really embraced open source.” In a recent interview with reporters, Fox (GitLab) company founder and CEO Chen Ran was right. In recent years, the “exposure” of open source is getting higher and higher. This year has been included in the “14th Five-year Plan”. In Chen ran’s words, this year can be regarded as the “first year” of open source in terms of promotion and popularity. However, open source can not be simply understood as a technology, but a culture. From this point of view, open source is more like soil, on which grass can grow, flowers can blossom, connected into a forest… And now, the domestic open source “soil” is apparently not fertile enough. In the past, a common misconception about open source was that it was “open source equals free”. The common practice was to get free source code from the community and have it developed and applied by in-house developers on demand. According to Chen Ran, this approach of “acquisition only, no contribution” is actually a closed-door approach. There will be unpredictable problems in the later operation and iteration, and the recruitment cost of open source talents is not low. Therefore, to truly embrace open source, one must open up the core source code and become a true participant and contributor to the community. “In fact, statistically speaking, some open source projects in China are quite advanced, mainly cloud computing and big data, but we still lack revolutionary open source projects, such as core open source software such as operating systems.” Li Wei, deputy director of cloud University institute of China Academy of Information and Communication Technology, said that the fundamental goal of open source is to let more people use it, so as to produce factual standards, improve code quality and influence the whole industry chain. However, the experience of operation mode in China is not mature yet, and there is still a lot to be improved.
Relying on OGA Alliance to build an Open source IM instant messaging ecosystem “platform” is precisely out of this original intention, Extreme Fox and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) jointly launched and established the “Open GitOps Industry Alliance” (abbreviated as: OGA Alliance), and relying on the alliance, the OGA Industry Development Community (OGA Community) was jointly established with China Academy of Information and Communications and CNCF.
It is understood that THE OGA Alliance takes GitOps technology application practice as the core, follows the concept of “open source, open, credible, independent, innovative and win-win”, is committed to promoting the industrialization development of open source and open GitOps technology, and makes positive contributions to standard formulation, industry practice, innovation research and development, talent training and other aspects. Specifically, the alliance will focus on cutting-edge open source technologies, methodologies and concepts such as GitOps, Infrastructure-is-code, code security, CI/CD and cloud native, and pay attention to the successful cases of domestic and foreign enterprises in building open source GitOps systems to empower enterprises in digital transformation. As an important part of the alliance, the OGA community will provide a platform for developers to share, communicate and learn, hosting regular events such as salons and conferences. It can be said that OGA alliance and OGA community have gathered various forces, including standards-setting units such as China Academy of Information and Communication, open source organizations such as CNCF, open source enterprises such as Jihu, and users such as China Unicom. “First, we want to understand the role and positioning of GitOps, and second, through some standards or technical discussions, promote the implementation of GitOps scenarios.” Li Wei emphasized, “In the future, we will attract more developers, service providers and users of different links of GitOps technology chain, and constantly improve and enrich the existing open source projects to build the OGA community into a systematic open source community.” Chen Ran also explained why he chose GitOps as the technical path: “GitOps is a set of research and development design system launched with the help of the concept of cloud native, which is born for cloud native. The benefit is that infrastructure changes can be committed in code via MR, CI/CD.” This means that in the future, every DEVELOPER and tester will no longer have to consider what the underlying infrastructure is like, as long as they can flexibly obtain the underlying resource supply through code submission according to their own needs and businesses.
In Chen ran’s opinion, the open source atmosphere is a community built by a group of people who uphold the concept of openness. Everyone gets together because of sharing, and contributes to the common goal and makes progress together. Specifically, open source is mainly divided into three stages — the first is to use open source, borrow open source, open source; Second, to contribute to open source, code feedback; Third, open source governance, become a true open source player. “I think open source in China is basically still in the early stages of the second phase.” Chen ran said, based on the policy and strategic support, domestic open source has been supported by the environment, capital and users. The next step is to cultivate and popularize open source culture, so that more people participate in the open source system and ecology. Therefore, OGA Alliance will continue to support the education development of GitOps start-ups and outstanding young talents, bridge the digital gap in talent skills, and build and improve the open source ecosystem of GitOps “production, learning, research and application” in China’s digital economy. As one of the initiators, Jihu will, on the one hand, provide GitLab with many years of experience in open source and open technology promotion and enterprise practice to promote the integration of open source industry, university and research. On the other hand, more attention will be paid to the cultivation of open source talents to enhance the competitiveness of open source talents in the international market in the future. “Relying on OGA Alliance, we will share GitLab GitOps training content based on open source to all alliance members for free, including examination and certification system, so that council members and member units can learn the most advanced information closest to open source. In addition, we will cooperate with our members to produce white papers and standards so that they can understand the development direction and trends of future technologies.” Chen Ran told reporters. Ultimately, his “desire” is to spread the DNA and culture of open source across companies and industries, and he believes the impact will be revolutionary. Different from traditional development methods, GitOps allows all code to be integrated into the same platform for unified operation and management. All code members use the same language and communication mode to collaborate, which greatly improves the efficiency of research and development, as well as the speed of code delivery and evolution. Feedback to the business level, which means faster innovation, affecting the way many companies input, output and operate. Of course, such dedication is not only out of his “open source ideal”, but also helpful for extreme Fox, an open source enterprise, to make the software ecosystem more open and open. “IT will greatly improve code quality and security,” Chen told Zd.com. “This approach will greatly promote the IT transformation and digital transformation. In the future, we look forward to more enterprises participating in mapping open source tools and ideas into their IT systems.”
Source: soft. Zhiding. Cn/software_zo…