Digital Guangdong or DigitalGD just publicly apologized last week after their CEC-IDE software was discovered to be based on Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code) source code. CEC-IDE helps programmers in writing code. Compared to VS Code, it has only slight changes and certain additional functions.
VS Code is licensed for reuse, even for commercial purposes. DigitalGD called it “negligent” not to disclose that CEC-IDE was based on VSCode, and admitted that the “self-developed” description was met with skepticism by Chinese programmers. “We are deeply sorry and embarrassed by this, and the relevant teams have been ordered to fix it,” DigitalGD said.
The incident comes as many Chinese companies are trying to prove their self-developed systems are eligible for use by the government and state-owned enterprises.
Chinese authorities have repeatedly demanded “secure, controllable” hardware and software for critical infrastructure, rewarding indigenous innovation, but this has prompted some companies to make misleading claims about their products. In May, Powerleader announced its “self-developed” Powerstar P3-01105 CPU, which was later found to be identical to Intel’s Core i3-10105 Comet Lake CPU.
Founded in October 2017, DigitalGD has a mission to “promote government reform and development in Guangdong.” It is co-funded by China Electronics Corp, Technology Financial Group, Tencent Holdings, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, and employs more than 2,000 people.
DigitalGD has developed several e-government service projects, including an online application that helps citizens access government documents. The company introduced CEC-IDE along with five other products in June, calling it “China’s first IDE tool that adapts to domestic operating systems and can be self-controlled.”
The IDE – integrated development environment – market is dominated by foreign companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Apple. CEC-IDE has raised doubts among many domestic programmers. In a post on the GitHub developer forum, several users said they found the software too similar to the Microsoft version and felt embarrassed by DigitalGD. “It is shameful for the company to advertise its ‘homegrown’ product, even if the MIT protocol allows such modifications,” commented one GitHub user.
In its latest announcement, DigitalGD shared that the product began testing in July and has not been used commercially. The official website for CEC-IDE is disabled as of August 29.
(According to SCMP)
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