Which Chinese Tech Giants Abandon Their Open‑Source Projects? A Data‑Driven Reveal

In China’s open‑source landscape, the major internet companies—Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent—lead the way.

As of 22 March 2019, Alibaba had 1,243 open‑source projects, Baidu 746, and Tencent 131. Alibaba’s projects accumulated 667,107 stars and 18,902 contributors, while Tencent’s gathered 251,445 stars and 1,009 contributors.

An open‑source project is considered abandoned if it has not been updated for more than 545 days (approximately one and a half years), i.e., the last push was before March 2018.

Basic Situation

(1) Number and proportion of abandoned projects

By March 2019, Baidu had 746 projects, 414 of which were abandoned; Alibaba had 1,243 projects, 761 abandoned; Tencent had 131 projects, 37 abandoned. Baidu and Alibaba thus have abandonment rates above 50%, while Tencent’s rate is about 28%.

(2) Abandoned projects by programming language

The abandoned projects span many languages, but over 80% are JavaScript. Other significant languages include C++, Java, C and Python.

(3) Top‑10 abandoned projects by contributors

The project with the most contributors is Alibaba’s docker (421 contributors). Most other projects have between 180 and 400 contributors, indicating a high level of openness.

(4) Top‑10 abandoned projects by commits

All top‑10 commit counts belong to Alibaba projects. The highest is Specs with 140,490 commits, followed by Alibaba’s mongo project with 36,375 commits.

Top‑10 Abandoned Open‑Source Projects

1. Alibaba: Weex

Weex, a cross‑platform mobile development tool, was open‑sourced on 11 March 2016. It enables developers to write native‑level performance apps using front‑end syntax and supports iOS, Android, YunOS and Web. The last update was 19 October 2017. After migrating to the Apache Foundation, the new repository incubator‑weex continues to be maintained and now has 12,965 stars.

Keywords: Alibaba, JavaScript, V8, Vue, native rendering

2. Alibaba: AndFix

AndFix (Android hot‑fix) is an Android hot‑fix library created on 15 September 2015, last updated 18 October 2017. It supports Android 2.3‑6.0, ARM and x86 architectures, and both Dalvik and ART runtimes.

3. Alibaba: dexposed

Dexposed is an AOP framework for Android, created on 30 June 2015 and last updated 29 March 2017. It enables runtime method interception for performance monitoring, hot patches, SDK hooking, etc.

4. Baidu: kityminder

KityMinder, an online mind‑map editor from Baidu’s FEX team, was created on 16 December 2013 and last updated 12 August 2015. It offers native‑like interaction, cloud storage sync, and one‑click sharing via a generated link.

5. Alibaba: kissy

Kissy is a modular, high‑performance JavaScript framework created on 10 July 2010, last updated 13 June 2016. It provides DOM, Event, Ajax, Anim utilities and supports full‑terminal adaptation.

6. Tencent: AlloyImage

AlloyImage is an HTML5‑based professional image‑processing engine built with JavaScript. Created on 11 November 2012, its last update was 17 April 2017. It offers a rich set of image‑processing APIs.

7. Tencent: tsf

TSF is a high‑performance PHP framework based on coroutines and Swoole, created on 3 July 2015 and last updated 24 October 2017. It enables rapid development of high‑IO services (HTTP/TCP/UDP) with features such as asynchronous IO, timers, coroutine support and service monitoring.

Developed in PHP for higher productivity than C++

Leverages Swoole’s async IO and timers

Provides coroutine capabilities for async IO

Supports service monitoring and recovery

8. Alibaba (Ele.me): cooking

Cooking is a webpack‑based front‑end build tool from Ele.me’s front‑end team, created on 10 March 2016 and last updated 14 November 2017. It aims to be easy to use, with zero project dependencies, simple configuration, scaffolding, plugin mechanisms and customizable settings.

9. Alibaba: wax

Wax is a framework that lets developers write native iPhone apps using Lua. It bridges Lua scripts with Objective‑C runtime, allowing Lua code to access any Objective‑C class or framework. Created on 14 October 2015, last updated 30 March 2017.

10. Baidu: interview‑questions

Interview‑questions is a repository of interview questions from Baidu’s FEX team.

Overall, the data shows that while Alibaba and Baidu have a large number of open‑source projects, a significant portion of them have been abandoned, whereas Tencent’s smaller portfolio has a lower abandonment rate but has accelerated its open‑source activity since the end of 2016.