New digital infrastructure is becoming a new engine of economic growth, and operating systems built for digital infrastructure will underpin high-quality development of the digital economy – the sector is approaching a breakthrough.
The operating system is the computer’s soul, and its importance keeps growing. Academician Ni Guangnan likens it to the foundation on which applications are houses: building domestic OS capability concerns both information technology competitiveness and digital infrastructure security.
‘Using open source as the lever to build the next generation of operating systems is a valuable attempt to strengthen the digital foundation of economic and social development,’ as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has put it.
From nothing to strength
A booming digital economy and software industry, plus a huge domestic market, give companies strong motivation to develop their own operating systems. In June, Huawei’s HarmonyOS debuted – a major market and commercial step for domestic operating systems. On 30 September, openEuler, an open-source OS for digital infrastructure, was re-released with kernel technology shared with HarmonyOS. On 9 November, Huawei and community partners donated openEuler to the OpenAtom Foundation to speed the OS industry’s development.
Deng Taihua, Huawei’s president of computing product line, said openEuler has upgraded from a server OS to an OS for digital infrastructure, supporting IT, CT and OT scenarios across servers, cloud, edge and embedded devices – better meeting the digital transformation needs of every industry.
Chinese enterprise IT has gone through open source, localisation and cloud-native shifts, prompting traditional OS vendors to rethink technology and market strategy. Domestic operating systems are moving, as one vendor executive put it, from ‘from nothing to something’ toward ‘from weak to strong’.
A community at scale
The openEuler community now gathers nearly 10,000 developers, close to 100 special interest groups and over 300 enterprises – spanning processors, complete systems, infrastructure software, application software and industry customers. Mainstream domestic OS vendors have all shipped commercial distributions based on openEuler, running core systems in government, telecom, finance and energy.
Kylin Software sees openEuler as the base for secure, stable OS products for more Chinese industry users, while sharing the latest results with global developers – a foundation for going international. SUSE’s Greater China chairman added that building a new-generation OS on the openEuler base, supplementing existing kernel capability and international ecosystem strengths, will give it strong technical advantages for future enterprise infrastructure choices.
Huawei says it will keep investing in five areas – technical innovation, ecosystem building, commercial promotion, open-source development and talent – to accelerate OS innovation with the industry. As open-source projects evolve from founder-led to industry co-built and community-governed, they will gather more innovation forces, move from open governance to self-sustaining prosperity, and lay a secure foundation for digital infrastructure.
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