China Open Source Daily — 2026-10-26
On 2026-09-07 the Supreme People’s Court issued the country’s first national judicial rule-making document on AI disputes — 24 articles, Five Parts, effective as authoritative guidance — and Article 13, on open-source software, is the first time a Chinese court of last resort has written a liability safe-harbour for open-source developers and providers into a general rule. The conditions are narrow and worth reading precisely: the court weighs the type of open-source licence, the specific content of the rights restrictions, the security and compliance measures taken, and the degree of disclosure; and a developer or provider who supplies code modules free of charge and publicly explains their functionality and security risks may be found not liable when a third party’s use causes infringement. Eleven days earlier, on 2026-10-25, a state-informatization industry outlet published an account of why units have begun halting blind domestic-system replacement, and named the mechanism precisely: the acceptance criterion has changed, 国产化率 is now a reference item and no longer a hard threshold, and the binding test is whether the system carries the business, whether faults can be cleared quickly, whether migrated data stays intact, and whether efficiency visibly declines. And on 2026-10-22 the Wall Street Journal reported that DeepSeek raised USD 15 billion in a second private round, nearly double its target, and is accelerating toward a STAR Market listing in Shanghai. Three documents, three different instruments — a court rule, an assessment standard, and a cap table — all deciding the same thing: what counts as a defensible act.