By hmimcu 
When it comes to the “bottleneck” in the field of technology, many people think of “lack of core and soul”. “Core” refers to chips, and “soul” refers to core basic software such as operating systems. For a long time, China has highly relied on foreign technology in core hardware production, basic software development, and other aspects, and technological security cannot be ignored.
In recent years, behind the four words “lack of core and soul”, what has made the industry even more concerned is that some basic tools for technological innovation also face the risk of being “stuck”. The EDA ban is a typical example. In August 2022, the United States Department of Commerce issued regulations to implement export control on EDA software necessary for the design of GAAFET (full gate field-effect transistor) structure integrated circuits. GAAFET EDA software is a necessary tool for achieving processes of 3 nanometers and below. Although our chip maturity process has not yet reached 3 nanometers, this ban is undoubtedly a heavy blow to the future development of China’s chip localization and high-end.
In the complex game of major powers, technological blockade has penetrated from software and hardware technology and equipment to the level of basic tools. If the EDA ban has a greater impact on the future of the chip industry, then at the level of software infrastructure tools, once software development tools are “stuck”, it will immediately affect the development of the software industry.
As the name suggests, software development tools are tools that help people develop software, and are essential tools that support the entire software lifecycle from requirement planning, development, testing, and release. Modern software development is a standardized assembly line. If we compare it to a modern port, various software development tools such as cranes, gantry cranes, dredging ships, loading and unloading centers, and other modern equipment. Once the software development tools are blocked and cut off, the port will return to the original stage of manual handling.
In the booming development of China’s software industry today, “lack of cores and soul” has become a popular topic, and the risk of “bottleneck” in software basic tools is more like a huge grey rhinoceros, which undoubtedly requires the industry to rethink and recognize.
1. China’s Software Industry: The “Rootless Hidden Worries” Behind Prosperity
If we compare the Chinese software industry to a tree, in the past 20 years, this big tree has experienced rapid growth and lush branches and leaves.
According to the People’s Daily, from 2012 to 2021, China’s software industry revenue increased from approximately 2.5 trillion yuan to approximately 9.5 trillion yuan, with an annual growth rate of 16.1%.
From the perspective of the scale and growth rate of the software industry, China’s software growth rate is fast enough to surpass the world. According to statistics from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, from 2000 to 2020, the overall size of the Chinese software market has grown 135 times, while in the United States it has grown 3.2 times. In 2020, the scale of China’s software industry accounted for 24% of the global software industry.
However, behind the data boom is the weak root system of the software industry, and the start of independent innovation is still very difficult.
For a long time, the software development tool market has always been dominated by European and American countries. According to research data from the China Software Association, in 2020, the US accounted for four fifths of global operating system and basic software (including desktop, database, cloud operating system, tool software, etc.) revenue.
According to the 2022 software development tool market analysis report released by The Express Wire, in the global software development tool market, North America has a market share of over 50% and Europe has a market share of over 20%. Among the top ten software development tool manufacturers in the world, 6 are American companies, including well-known companies such as Microsoft, Perforce, Adobe, and Oracle.
Just as lithography machines are essential key production tools in the chip industry, software development tools are the root technology of the software industry. It can improve the quality and efficiency of software development, providing varying degrees of assistance to software developers from software problem definition, requirement analysis, overall design, detailed design, testing, coding, to document generation and software tool management.
There are various types of software development tools, including project management tools, code hosting tools, code inspection tools, compilation and construction tools, as well as tools for deploying, testing, and publishing environments. Each type of tool focuses on solving specific problems in the software development process. For example, project management tools enable development teams to collaborate efficiently, code hosting tools solve developers’ problems in cross regional collaboration, multi branch concurrency, code version management, and other aspects. Automated software testing tools can replace some manual input to improve testing efficiency.
In the era of globalization, the rapid development of China’s software industry has largely benefited from the “global technology dividend” of the digital economy. At the forefront of development, the technical viewpoints of “buying is better than making” and “there is no need to repeatedly make wheels” also have certain applicability in the market.
Nowadays, with the increasingly fierce international technological competition and industrial technological friction, the anti globalization forces are constantly rising. If we no longer attach importance to independent technological innovation and establish the industry on an uncontrolled external technological foundation, it will undoubtedly have an impact on future development.
Taking the IDE field, which is the most basic software development tool, as an example, the IDE field has been monopolized by multiple foreign software giants, such as Visual Studio and JetBrains. IDE is an integrated development environment that integrates multiple functions such as code writing, compilation, and execution. In the past, global developers based on software development tools such as Visual Studio and VScode from the Microsoft ecosystem contributed their development code to the Github platform, continuously developing a large number of application software in the Microsoft ecosystem, further strengthening the market monopoly of international giants such as Microsoft.
At present, Microsoft has 90 million developers and has produced 38 million applications for Microsoft, but there is still no tool chain product that can match it in China, let alone the ecosystem. Behind the continuous expansion of monopoly advantages by European and American software giants is the development “ceiling” where the domestic software ecosystem has always been suppressed, and also the “rootless” pain behind the prosperity of domestic software.
The Sword of Damocles with 2 Basic Tools Discontinued
What is the harm of software development tools being blocked and cut off?
Every software company and large enterprise development team cannot do without software development tools. Currently, the common choice for domestic enterprises is to directly purchase commercial development tools from Europe and America. Some domestic software tools that can be replaced in the market often rely on foreign open-source technology for packaging and “secondary development”.
Industry experts point out that referring to the precedent of chip EDA software “bottleneck”, whether purchasing commercial tools or building based on open source, these two paths are actually “looking beautiful”, and the actual risks are still numerous. Once subjected to foreign sanctions, a large number of domestic enterprises and research and development teams’ software development, iteration, update, and operation and maintenance will be greatly impacted, and even suspended. Among them, from small to information management tools, such as requirement management and test management; The risk of being sanctioned cannot be ignored for tools such as code warehouses, product warehouses, and inspections that are strongly related to outsourcing.
To this end, the industry urgently needs to clarify two major consensus:
Firstly, the commercial version is not equal to the “risk-free version”.
It has been proven that sanctions for commercial versions of ICT technology are often the most commonly chosen and easily implemented means in international economic frictions. Taking the United States as an example, due to the foreign export control policies issued by the United States Department of Commerce and others, from 2019 to now, more than 600 Chinese enterprises and institutions have been successively included in the U.S. “Entity List”, and all enterprises involved in the list are no longer entitled to obtain various commercial technologies provided by the United States.
Taking Huawei as an example, since Huawei was included in the “physical list” on May 16, 2019, all American software has been cut off from Huawei, including core application software such as ERP, as well as basic software such as operating systems, databases, middleware, and development tools. For example, in the ban issued by the United States in May 2020, it explicitly required major chip manufacturers worldwide to prohibit the production of chips designed using American software for Huawei. That is to say, as long as the chip foundry is still using American software, it cannot produce chips for Huawei.
The risk of commercial sanctions cannot be spared even by higher education institutions with “academic borderless”. In 2020, Harbin Institute of Technology and Harbin Engineering University were “cut off” by American software MATLAB. Not only is the software unusable, but school teachers and students cannot include any charts and data obtained using MATLAB in publicly published papers. MATLAB is known as the “engineering artifact” and is widely used in the field of engineering, covering disciplines such as mathematical calculation, modeling and simulation, electronic communication, mechanical engineering, automotive aviation, electric energy, economics and finance, and biomedical science.
Secondly, open source technology is not completely neutral.
Open source has become one of the mainstream trends in software development. However, an increasing number of facts and precedents are also warning the industry that open source tools, platforms, and technologies often find it difficult to maintain neutrality in the face of politics and economy, and open source can also become a weapon of technological sanctions at any time.
Taking the world’s largest code hosting platform GitHub as an example, GitHub currently gathers 300 million code repositories worldwide, accounting for 90% of all open source software. But as an American company, during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, GitHub has clearly raised a ban “scalpel” to Russian developers. In the first half of 2022, the accounts of Russian bank Sberbank, Russia’s largest private bank Alfa Bank, and other companies were first banned by GitHub. These enterprise accounts have gone through the process of disabling code repositories and being directly deleted by the platform. Subsequently, individual developer accounts that have cooperative relationships with sanctioned entities, as well as individual accounts that have previously or currently worked with sanctioned entities, were severely banned.
Regarding the lockdown of Russian developer accounts, GitHub has stated: “Like any company conducting business in the United States, GitHub may have to restrict users and customers who are designated as Specially Designated Nationals (SDNs) or are denied or blocked under US and other applicable sanctions laws, or may represent groups of users and customers who are blocked from using GitHub
At the same time, GitHub’s vision is to become a global platform for developer collaboration, regardless of where developers reside. We will thoroughly review government sanctions to ensure that users and customers are not affected beyond legal requirements
Experts believe that whether it is commercial tool software or open source technology, it is a “double-edged sword” for the development of the domestic software industry. In the long run, only by creating a domestically owned software ecosystem can we truly open up the upper limit space for China’s industrial development.
The best time to cultivate a forest is now
In the science fiction novel “Three Body”, the three body humans lock down the development of human technology at a lower level by blocking the basic science of Earth civilization. In the current international competition, the “bottleneck” in the field of technological innovation is not an unbreakable science fiction legend. The key to cracking it lies in accelerating independent innovation.
Currently, the commercial tools, technical standards, and technological evolution trends of the global software industry are largely controlled by European and American enterprises. Rome was not built in a day. From development tools to operating systems, databases, and middleware, American software companies have a long history of researching and developing root technology, and the roots of the software industry are very strong. After years of development and catch-up, China’s software industry has basically built a relatively complete structural framework, but overall it is still very weak.
In recent years, with the events of ZTE and Huawei, as well as trade frictions between China and the United States, more and more enterprises have embarked on the path of self research and innovation, accumulating valuable first-hand experience in exploring unmanned areas. Among them, the best observation sample is undoubtedly Huawei.
Before 2019, Huawei’s software tools mostly adopted a “purchase+self-developed” model, with open source software, commercial software, and self-developed products coexisting. In order to crack the “choke” risk of software development tools, Huawei began to carry out self research in Americanization in 2019, covering the whole stack self research and replacement of several categories, including hardware (X86 ->ARM), operating system (Linux/Windows ->Euler), database (Oracle ->GaussDB), middleware, application software transformation, etc., involving the replacement of hundreds of components, and the test and verification of tens of millions of lines of code.
After three years, in the field of software development tools, Huawei has completely achieved de Americanization. At the same time, open-source software also has the ability to evolve independently, eliminating software supply chain risks.
In fact, self development of software development tools cannot be achieved overnight, and so can Huawei. If we look back at the self-developed timeline of Huawei’s software development tools, from the innovation of the first line of code to today’s fully “de beautified” mature product matrix, Huawei’s investment in research and development time spans over 20 years. According to insiders, as early as around 2000, Huawei began to accelerate its own research and development of software research and development tools due to its rapid business development. These studies form the foundation of complete autonomy and control now.
From this, it can be seen that Huawei is one of the few companies with bottom line thinking, similar to HiSilicon chips. Many years ago, Huawei made the assumption of extreme survival, ‘It is expected that one day, all advanced chips and technologies in the United States will be unavailable’. Starting from the assumption that it will never happen, Huawei established Hisense Semiconductor as early as 2004, silently “creating a spare tire” for the company’s survival. Later on, assuming it came true, Hisense also transitioned from a spare tire to a regular one, becoming one of the benchmarks for Huawei’s independent research and development.
Nowadays, in the field of software development tools, after a long technological iteration, Huawei has gradually formed a CodeArts software development production line that can support typical research and development scenarios such as web development, mobile application development, microservice development, Cloud Native application development, and embedded development.
In terms of core development tools such as code repositories and product repositories, the performance of Huawei’s development tools has reached or surpassed the level of international peers, and can completely replace American products. For new products, the validation of large-scale complex business is the most powerful proof. As a technology group with operations in over 170 countries and regions around the world, whether software development tools are easy to use or not, we must first pass the level of Huawei’s own use.
At present, CodeArts has passed the rigorous testing and engineering applications of industry high standards and large-scale software development businesses such as Huawei Cloud, Huawei Telecom products, terminal cloud consumption business, and chip research and development. These low-level development tools have not only achieved complete substitution within Huawei, but have also successfully overflowed into external markets. At present, the Huawei cloud software development production line CodeArts has attracted millions of users from more than ten industries including government, finance, education, logistics, software, etc.
In the field of software development, Huawei has also continuously launched basic tools for segmented fields. For example, the software development management and team collaboration tool Huawei Cloud CodeArts Req is designed for large-scale enterprise research and development scenarios. It has fully covered the research and development of Huawei’s cloud, management, end, vehicle, and chip related products, achieving monthly API usage of over 1.5 billion times and cumulative management of over 50 million demands.
From the example of Huawei, it is not difficult to see that in order to achieve breakthroughs in root technology in the domestic software industry, it is necessary to take the path of independent research and development and achieve original and new breakthroughs. And there can be no further hesitation or waiting. The “neck stuck” crisis is the best opportunity, and we need to start now.
Only by mastering the innovation of software root technology in one’s own hands can one build the cornerstone of sustainable industrial development and enable the upper level application software to flourish. If we say that in the past decade, China’s software industry has relied on the Westhttps://www.stoneitech.com/