Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

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In May last year, the desktop operating system root community launched the Kirin developer platform for the first time. A year later, the open source desktop operating system "Open Kirin 1.0" was officially released, indicating that our country has the ability to select and build operating system components, and fully confirms the infinite potential of this "co-creation" model of the open source community.

Before the start of the conference, we were honored to invite Li Zhenning, director of the openKylin Ecological Committee and a senior engineer, to chat with you about the birth, construction process and practical achievements of the openKylin community. We share the development story of how Kirin Software has persisted in embracing open source and contributing to open source for more than 20 years, and how to gradually create an open source business card based on openKylin, looking forward to providing reference for enterprises to build an open source project community.

The following is a transcript of the interview, slightly abridged.

Q1

You have been working on open source for many years. Can you share your previous and present open source experience?

Li Zhenning: I first came into contact with open source in 1998. At that time, there was not much business using Linux in China, so we could only find a few materials on the Internet, such as BBS. In 2000, I joined Chinese software. At first, I did research and development, and then I did technical support and training for Linux. I have been engaged in open source related work.

In 2000, I participated in the procurement of the Beijing Municipal Government and the Shanghai Municipal Government's desktop office system procurement, which are two large-scale user applications related to open source. Through these two application service work, I also have more knowledge and ideas about open source.

In 2006, I came into contact with the newly established China Open Source Software Promotion Alliance (COPU), formally engaged in community volunteer work, met Chairman Lu Shouqun, and a group of leaders who are still active in the front line of open source, such as Chen Xu, and followed them to learn and grow, make progress together, and then have been engaged in open source promotion and evangelization work for nearly 20 years now.

Q2

Q2: what do you think is the difference between the work of an open source evangelist in the enterprise and that in the open source community?

Li Zhenning: I think the evangelist has two roles in the enterprise and in the open source community. The task of preaching in the enterprise is heavier than in the community. Because at present, if you want to open source, you must have the strong support and support of the enterprise. Therefore, in the process of preaching, it is very important that enterprises from leaders to various departments are very clearly aware of the importance of open source, as well as the strategic guidance of open source for enterprise innovation. Only with the support of enterprises, can open source be carried forward, and enterprises will further expand their contribution and influence in open source. On the outside, it is mainly to let more members of the public, developers and customers know, believe and embrace open source. There is a big difference between these two kinds of work.

Q3

Kirin Software has persisted in embracing and contributing to open source for more than 20 years. Can you briefly introduce to us the current layout of Kirin in open source?

Li Zhenning: Kirin Software has actually been working on open source for a long time. Since 1999, it has adjusted the technical route of the operating system from Unix to Linux, and has made continuous contributions to a series of domestic communities such as China Open Source Software Promotion Alliance and China Open Source Cloud Alliance, as well as international communities such as China, Japan, South Korea and Northeast Asia Open Source Alliance, as well as kernel community and Youkylin community. At present, the layout of Kirin software in the open source community is mainly divided into four parts:

The first part is the kernel community, which is one of our most important communities now. There have been many contributors to this piece of Kirin software, and now there are thousands of lines of code accepted by the international Linux Kernel kernel community, and we are still growing.

The second part is the open source community we established-openKylin (Open Kirin) community. This community is not only a root community in our desktop field, but also a very scarce community in China. We hope that through the contribution and layout in this area, so that the relevant open source root community can prosper, so as to promote the construction of the desktop operating system community.

The third part is our community in the server field, including our cooperation with the major domestic server root communities such as openEuler, openAnolis and OpenCloudOS. You can see that our contribution to the openEuler community is very outstanding.

The fourth part is the cloud computing community. For example, we are now very familiar with the OpenStack international open source community, we also have a lot of contributions, including several important latest community versions such as Victoria, the contribution of Kirin software is among the best at home and abroad.

In these communities, we promote technological innovation by improving product performance, accelerating ecological expansion and promoting technological innovation. In addition, we also promote product progress by constantly improving the products of our open source community through user docking, providing user feedback and communication channels.

Q4

On July 5, the open source desktop operating system "Open Kirin 1.0" was officially released. Would you please talk about the current situation and ecological vision of the project?

Li Zhenning: in fact, Kylin was already released in June last year, and it was searched by Weibo, Toutiao, Douyin and other channels and received wide attention. This also reflects the lack of our domestic desktop open source community and open source desktop operating system, which is also a direction that the industry and users pay close attention to.

The openKylin community is committed to creating an "industry-led, technologically advanced and ecologically rich" desktop operating system root community through open source and open community cooperation. At present, it has 21 board member units, more than 300 enterprise member units, more than 990000 community users, and more than 4000 contributors to the CLA agreement. Whether in terms of the elephant factor or the pony factor, the openKylin community is a very mature, healthy and rapidly rising technology community.

There are now more than 80 SIG groups in the community, covering not only community governance, ecology, security, IoT, AI, but also intelligent applications, basic hardware, human-computer interaction, cloud convergence and other technology directions, representing our attempt and prospect for the future operating system on the desktop.

Now that version 1.0 has completed the upgrade of more than 20 important components, it indicates that we now have the ability to build desktop operating systems. It should be said that the two important strategic goals of creating this community at that time had been basically achieved. The first is to make up for the deficiency. We should strengthen the overall architecture of the desktop operating system and the ability of technology path planning; the second is collaborative innovation. We have also integrated many industry leading enterprises to carry out collaborative innovation in CPU, GPU, artificial intelligence and other emerging fields.

In the future, we will mainly promote the future development from product optimization to standard construction, from business owner-oriented industry drive, from domestic well-known to international leadership.

Q5

Can you share with us the successful practice of Open Kirin in promoting collaborative innovation?

Li Zhenning: for example, UKUI, as one of the important projects of opening Kirin, has been backed up to the mainline environment by many mainstream communities as the main line or the basic software package. This is our contribution in the community package.

In the industry, such as our cooperation with RISC-V. We all know that RISC-V is a very popular open source hardware, but it has always been used in the technology and laboratory technology of the open source community. This year, through a series of partners such as the open source community and Deep Mathematical Intelligence, we jointly launched the world's first RISC-V-based notebook computer, the ROMA. This computer is equipped with the new generation of openKylin UKUI 4.0 desktop environment by default, which attracted some technical attention all over the world at that time. Because there was no industrial application of RISC-V in the general field, now we have turned it into a reality.

Q6

We know that Kirin attaches great importance to the support of open source software and the two-way communication and feedback of the community. Please share with us the reasons why Kirin is an open source community.

Li Zhenning: the reason why Kirin Software is now an open source community is actually very clear. In the direction of domestic policy, we should build an industrial chain of technological innovation. For domestic, open source software is also one of the very important sources of the whole software innovation chain, so if you want to achieve technological innovation in the software field, you must have innovation ability in the open source community. This is our root cause. In terms of policy orientation, the 14th five-year Plan for the Development of Software and Information Technology Services clearly defines the need to prosper the domestic open source community ecology, and proposes to build 2-3 open source communities with international influence by 2025. In addition, we all know that Kirin Software itself is a provider of operating systems and related solutions, as far as it is concerned, whether it is a technological breakthrough or ecological growth, it must rely on the open source community. From this point of view, this is determined by the genes and blood of our enterprise, so we must regard the open source community as the strategy of the enterprise, as well as the soil for our future ecological construction and technology accumulation.

Q7

What achievements has Kirin achieved in the open source community? And what to do next?

Li Zhenning: on the one hand, we have now contributed more than 5 million open source code to the world, and since 2013, we have built our own Youqilin community. Now the cumulative number of downloads worldwide has exceeded 40 million, with more than 200000 active enthusiasts. Our self-developed UKUI components have now been included in the official warehouses of domestic and foreign mainstream distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, openEuler and so on.

On the other hand, we are also the earliest domestic enterprises engaged in open source operating system research and development and industrialization, and now we are full members of Linux, as well as platinum donors of Open Atomic Open Source Association, we participate in Mulan licensing, participate in the launch of the openEuler community, which are now an important part of open source. Including the openKylin community, has now become one of the most mainstream desktop root communities in China. In fact, openKylin has attracted more attention at home and abroad, and many overseas media have also specially reported openKylin. We are gradually creating open source business cards through openKylin.

With the blessing of these open source contributions, our business volume has also gradually increased. According to the data released by Kirin Software in 2022, our annual revenue has exceeded 1 billion, keeping us in the forefront of both desktops and servers in the Chinese Linux market. It should be said that we have got good positive feedback in both the community and the market.

The next step of the plan, on the one hand, we should continue to adhere to the open source strategy, firmly embrace and contribute to open source. We will further enhance our importance in the Open Atomic Open Source Conference, and we will also more actively contribute to the domestic mainstream open source communities such as openKylin and openEuler. In addition, we will also attract more excellent domestic and foreign development enterprises and developers to join the openKylin community and contribute to the community. We hope that through the open source community, we can truly unite the open source forces and create open source business cards.

Q8

Would you please share with us any specific measures taken by Kirin in terms of developers?

Li Zhenning: we are now divided into several levels about the work of developers. In order to encourage more developers to join us, in the openKylin community we provide a fully automated, full-process, full-lifecycle community tool chain, including account platform, CLA protocol signing, documentation platform, translation platform, integration platform, compilation platform, code quality testing platform, and code repository. We all provide a dynamic and automated tool chain for developers to get started quickly.

In addition, we also noticed that there are many developers who are not great gods from the beginning, they all grew up from a small white. So for these enthusiastic students or beginner developers, we provide openKylin growth system. From joining the open source community to signing agreements and then to continuous learning and growth, we have set up beginners, intermediate and senior gods for different tasks and different points rewards, just like upgrading to help developers grow from a rookie to a god, so that developers can continue to get positive material and spiritual feedback in the process, and grow and progress together with the open source community.

Q9

Based on your long-term experience in Guanji project, please talk to us about how to prevent risks while enterprises embrace open source.

Li Zhenning: open source software is now the most important part of the whole software. The data show that 95% of the software code is open source. From the side, it proves that open source software has achieved great success, but it also means great potential risks. Because open source code is unlike the commercial code of an enterprise, which has undergone certain commercial tests and risk tests, there are several levels of risk in open source:

The first is the standard security issue. Because the code is open source, it is easy to find and exploit security vulnerabilities, so it is necessary to have professional security tools for security baseline scanning, including omni-directional inspection from kernel vulnerabilities, system vulnerabilities, configuration errors and so on. From this point of view, open source software, like commercial software, should have professional security precautions. Secondly, the license agreement for the code of open source software is not the license agreement for our common commercial software such as Copyright. Open source license agreement has its own particularity, it also has legal risks and is protected by legal provisions. once you use open source software, you accept the terms of its open source license agreement by default. Therefore, some professional legal assessments are needed to help developers and users confirm that their open source software is in compliance. Third, in the process of operation and maintenance of open source software, there are also supply chain operation and maintenance compliance, open source license compliance, and open source security operation and maintenance compliance. All these need to be constantly grown, tested and improved in the process of operation and maintenance.

For example, in the field of security, there have been several major events in the open source world, such as Heartbleed vulnerabilities and Dirtycow vulnerabilities, which pose great security risks to users and operators. Kirin Software announced and launched an upgrade patch as soon as the vulnerability was found, forcing users to push for a security upgrade.

So at present, the users of Kirin operating system cover the government, finance, energy, transportation and many other fields, but there is no large-scale downtime, virus infection and other problems because of open source security problems. This also proves the security capability of open source software from the side.

Q10

Can you share the cooperation that has been established between Kirin and China ICT?

Li Zhenning: China Information and Communication Institute is one of the first institutions in China to begin to engage in open source research. Kirin Software has worked closely with CICT since the beginning of trusted open source research, and is one of the first units to pass the evaluation of trusted open source community. We are also a member of the trusted open source community of CICT. In addition, some open source compliance sharing and open source governance forums of CICT, such as the annual OSCAR open source industry conference of CICT, we also actively participated in and shared at the meeting, and both sides infiltrated each other.

In this year's 2023 OSCAR Open Source Industry Conference, the Open Source Project Community and Digital Public goods Sub-Forum, openKylin Community Deputy Secretary General and head of Operations Liu Min will share the practice of openKylin open source community and ecological construction, looking forward to in-depth discussion with you on the ecological construction of the community after completion, and how to better promote the development of the project.

At the end of the interview, Mr. Li Zhenning also issued an invitation to the vast number of open source participants: if you want to understand the cutting-edge open source trends, welcome to participate in the OSCAR Open Source Industry Conference and openKylin to promote the common development and progress of the open source industry.

On September 21, we will see each other again.

The OSCAR Open Source Industry Conference will be held on September 21, 2023. Invite industry experts and industry elites to explore ways of open source compliance governance and promote open source ecological construction in various industries.

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