Pony Ma Empowers Open Source And Participates in Building A Global Technology Community
Tars
Published at 08/30/2019
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On August 26, at the 2019 China International Intelligent Industry Fair (referred to as Expo) summit forum held in Chongqing, Pony Ma, Chairman and CEO of Tencent, gave a speech. He mentioned that Tencent is willing to open source internal and external code and actively Participate in the construction of a global technology community.

"We will actively participate in the construction of the global technology community through internal and external open source methods. "

"No country can fully owns all the resources, technology and capacity new round of global technology and industry need today, fragmented industry and technology decoupling would damage the entire long-term interests of mankind. "

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Tencent open source culture: three steps

Tencent's open source started in 2010 and began rapid development in 2016. In the past two years, it has gradually entered the right track and established a good open source culture . In 2010, under the guidance of Tencent's open strategy, the R & D model of "openness, sharing, and joint development" began to be implemented within the technical team.

Tencent is known in the industry for encouraging internal competition and promoting product orientation, but what is reflected behind it is Tencent's repeated R & D in technology research and development and low resource utilization. The technical team is accustomed to carrying on and then optimizing, and the technology serves more business and users. This actually deviates from the open source culture .

From 2010 to 2015, Tencent first advocated open source internally, and advocated an "open, shared, and joint development" research and development model. Reliable component companies internally reuse, reduce repetitive wheels, and improve efficiency. This is the basis for external open source .

As time draws closer, Tencent has also concluded its "open source line" in three steps :

The first step is to strengthen internal open source collaboration , mainly through cross-organizational collaboration to promote cross-departmental collaboration; at the same time, optimize internal resource allocation, focus on key technology directions, and seek technological breakthroughs ;

The second step is to introduce external resources through external open source, optimize design and code, expand application scenarios, and strengthen contact with external contributors to build technical influence ;

The third step is to implement large-scale technology promotion and application of some projects with broad prospects through the open governance of the community . In the process, train community leaders with leadership and influence, and build a developer ecosystem. Realize the optimal allocation of research and development resources for the whole society.

Furthermore, in the second half of 2018, Tencent announced the adjustment of its organizational structure and formally established a technical committee led by members of the General Office to promote open source collaboration. Emphasizing open source from the perspective of organizational structure is a very rare decision in China's Internet technology companies. It is not difficult to see Tencent's firm determination to open source. It is precisely this emphasis on strategic level that promotes Tencent's open source development in recent years.

Talk is cheap, show me the code

In the past two years, Tencent has frequently appeared on the lists of various open source organizations and foundations, and Tencent can always be seen at major open source summits and forums. But these can only explain the activeness of Tencent's open source, not the achievements of Tencent's open source.

In the programmer's world, the code speaks.

As of August 2019, Tencent has a total of 82 open source projects, covering multiple fields such as cloud, games, big data, AI and applets. Tencent, which has fallen behind a few years ago, is open source. At present, its contribution rankings have approached the top ten in the world . Star projects including microservices framework Tars, artificial intelligence computing platform Angel, WeChat visual style library WeUI are all good among developers Word of mouth and widespread adoption.

Tars: Massive services, a framework

Tars is a mature RPC framework developed by Tencent, which can quickly build systems and automatically generate code, taking into account ease of use and high performance. At the same time, Tars supports multiple programming languages ​​including C ++, Golang, Java, Node.js, PHP, and Python, which can help developers and enterprises to quickly build their own stable and reliable distributed applications in the form of microservices, allowing development to focus on business Logic to effectively improve operational efficiency. Tars is the crystallization of Tencent's microservices for ten years. Tencent has hundreds of products and the world's well-known mass services run on this self-developed microservices framework. On June 25, 2018, Tencent announced that it would contribute the Tars project to the Linux Foundation.

WeUI: Web Development Basic Style Library

WeUI is a set of basic style libraries consistent with WeChat's native visual experience. The WeChat official design team is tailor-made for WeChat Web development, which can make users' perception of use more uniform. With its development-friendly features, WeUI has become a tool commonly used by many computer majors in graduation design and has been widely recognized.

Angel: a distributed computing platform based on a parameter server architecture

Angel was jointly developed by Tencent and Peking University, taking into account the high availability of industry and innovation in academia. It adjusts performance through Tencent's big data, has wide applicability and stability, and has obvious advantages in processing higher-dimensional models. Angel is written in Java and Scala and supports running on Yarn and Kubernetes. Through PS Service abstraction, it provides two modules that can integrate the functions of Spark / PyTorch and Parameter Server for distributed training. In the future, graphics computing and deep learning frameworks will be supported.

Mars: WeChat official terminal basic components

Mars is the official terminal basic component of WeChat. It is a socket-based solution designed in combination with mobile applications. It has better controllability in network tuning and was developed using C ++. Currently, Mars has access to WeChat Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, WP and other clients. In design, Mars is premised on cross-platform and cross-business, and follows the design principles of high availability, high performance and load balancing.

Open source is a show, KPI project?

In China, developers are often criticized for "bringing doctrine." They only know that they are using open source projects, but they rarely give back to the community. In the world, cloud vendors are often defined as open source "vampires", earning a lot of money with open source software, but have not made any contribution to open source.

Domestic technology companies are often criticized for "open source is a show, KPI engineering." But in fact, open source is a trend, but also a responsibility and responsibility.

Why open source? There are at least three reasons:

  • First, open source can help others develop software faster and promote world innovation, mainly in terms of social value.
  • The second is that open source can force engineers to write better code.
  • Third, open source can more effectively use the power of the community to solve problems together.

A few years ago, Chinese technology giants such as BAT, etc., existed in the tail of the crane in the open source community. At that time, American companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon firmly occupied the head position, open sourced many popular tools, gave back to the community, and also held the voice.

But today, many Chinese companies, including Tencent, have turned from philanthropy to openness and a win-win situation. Tencent is determined to devote itself to open source in terms of organizational structure. This is a joyous situation for developers, for the community, and for the technology companies themselves.

As Ma Huateng said, the future world will be a science and technology community. " No country can fully possess all the resources, technologies and capabilities needed for a new round of science and technology and industry in the world. Industry fragmentation and technology decoupling will harm the long-term interests of mankind as a whole... "

This is what open source means.