  Open source software has drawn more and more attention from researchers,
developers and companies nowadays. Meanwhile, many Chinese technology companies
are embracing open source and choosing to open source their projects.
Nevertheless, most previous studies are concentrated on international companies
such as Microsoft or Google, while the practical values of open source projects
of Chinese technology companies remain unclear. To address this issue, we
conduct a mixed-method study to investigate the landscape of projects open
sourced by three large Chinese technology companies, namely Baidu, Alibaba, and
Tencent (BAT). We study the categories and characteristics of open source
projects, the developer's perceptions towards open sourcing effort for these
companies, and the internationalization effort of their open source projects.
We collected 1,000 open source projects that were open sourced by BAT in GitHub
and performed an online survey that received 101 responses from developers of
these projects. Some key findings include: 1) BAT prefer to open source
frontend development projects, 2) 88\% of the respondents are positive towards
open sourcing software projects in their respective companies, 3) 64\% of the
respondents reveal that the most common motivations for BAT to open source
their projects are the desire to gain fame, expand their influence and gain
recruitment advantage, 4) respondents believe that the most common
internationalization effort is "providing an English version of readme files",
5) projects with more internationalization effort (i.e., include an English
readme file) are more popular. Our findings provide directions for software
engineering researchers and provide practical suggestions to software
developers and Chinese technology companies.
