HBaseCon is the premier conference for the community of Apache HBase, an open-source, distributed, non-relational database for the Apache Hadoop ecosystem, which develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. Established in 2017, the annual HBaseCon Asia event gathers committers, contributors, developers, operators, learners, and users, with representation from the likes of Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei.
“Open-source initiatives have no borders. Nowadays it is almost impossible for a company to remain technologically advanced and rapidly upgrade its products without adopting open-source technologies,” said Dr. Baoqiu Cui, Vice President of Xiaomi Corporation and Chairman of Technical Committee. “Embracing open-source software is deeply rooted in Xiaomi’s engineering culture, and we will keep working with partners and developers worldwide to further build the open-source ecosystem.”
Xiaomi is currently the fourth-largest smartphone brand and the world’s largest consumer IoT platform; however, the company didn’t start off with hardware as its initial focus. Instead Xiaomi’s first product was the Android-based operating system MIUI, launched in 2010, which benefited greatly from the online community’s contributions.
Among all 82 HBase committers from mainland China, 17 are from mainland China, including 9 from Xiaomi. Duo Zhang, leader of the storage team at Xiaomi and the very first Apache HBase PMC member from mainland China, was the third-largest contributor in 2018 among all 7,000 committers of the Apache Software Foundation. Additionally, Xiaomi contributed 306 patches to HBase last year, accounting for 23% of the total 1,316 patches submitted by HBase contributors all over the world .
Xiaomi has taken other steps to champion open-source software. In 2018, Xiaomi officially open-sourced MACE (Mobile AI Compute Engine), a deep-learning inference framework. Xiaomi also invested RMB 1.65 billion in R&D in the first quarter of 2019, an increase of 50 percent from the prior year. The total investment in R&D last year was RMB 5.8 billion.