In October, Microsoft announced that it is shutting down its business social network, LinkedIn, in China. Having to comply with Chinese state restrictions has become increasingly challenging, it said.
The career-networking site had faced questions for blocking the profiles of some journalists. LinkedIn will launch a jobs-only version of the site, called InJobs, later this year, without the social feed or ability to share or post articles.
This leaves GitHub, also owned by Microsoft, as one of the few Western software platforms still accessible in China.
GitHub is the world's largest open-source coding platform. Here, software developers host their code in public for all to see, and benefit from others around the world combing it over for errors. The code can be used for free, as long as enhancements are added into the repository for others to use.
In 2020, nearly 10% of GitHub's 56 million contributors came from China. GitHub has been a triumph there for parent company Microsoft, which bought the platform for $7.5 billion in 2018.
With the departure of foreign social networks like Facebook and the rollback of LinkedIn's services there, GitHub is now the last major foreign-owned platform accessible in China that hosts user-generated content — an unpredictable set of information that would normally be at risk of censorship, screening and even summary blockage.
GitHub's narrow engineering focus gives it the best chance of avoiding China's onerous censorship of user comments across its social platforms. But there are powerful reasons why GitHub may also be retracted from use in China:
China's long-term record of infringing on intellectual property rights is well known and egregious. But the rule of law and respect for intellectual property still matters, whether formally between companies or informally in a coding repository.
