"The roots of China's operating system are firmly established"
[Text/Observer.com Lu Dong]
On December 16, at the Operating Systems Conference 2023 held in Beijing, Jiang Dayong, chairman of the openEuler Committee, introduced to Observer.com that up to now, Euler has accumulated more than 6.1 million installed units. At the same time, IDC predicted at the meeting that the new market share of openEuler in China's server operating system will reach 36.8% in 2023, nearly twice that of CentOS. This means that four years after open source, openEuler has grown into the No. 1 server operating system in China.
According to Liu Wenqing, vice chairman of the openEuler committee, "the fact that users take the initiative to choose openEuler shows that the roots of China's operating system are firmly established. Since everyone has this consensus, the ecology will form the effect of active convergence and active adaptation. ”
Ni Guangnan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, pointed out in his speech at the meeting that after years of development, with the participation and contribution of tens of thousands of developers, Euler has grown from a seed to a towering tree, and has undertaken the important task of building the "root technology" in the field of information in the mainland and the technical base of the digital economy. "The Euler system has been commercialized on a large scale in the fields of communications, finance, electric power, transportation, and informatization. Looking ahead, we are confident in Euler's prospects. ”
The scene of the operating system conference 2023 Source: Observer.com
"Not just for substitution"
Just as there are Android and iOS in the field of mobile operating systems, there are also Windows and CentOS in the field of server operating systems, and even some operating systems are open source, so why should the Chinese industry work together to build an openEuler?
"openEuler is not only a replacement, but also an operating system that meets the needs of technology trends and customers," Jiang Dayong pointed out to the observer.com, pointing out that in the server field, the phenomenon of "soft chimneys" in the past is relatively common, and a chip architecture will correspond to a set of operating systems, and application developers need to adapt to each "soft chimney", which is not value-added for end users. openEuler creatively proposes a set of code and architecture to support diverse computing power and all scenarios, and it is positioned as an open-source operating system for digital infrastructure.
In September 2021, Huawei announced the upgrade of openEuler from a server operating system to a digital infrastructure operating system that supports IT, CT, and In November 2021, Huawei and all community partners donated openEuler to the Open Atom Open Source Foundation, marking the transition of openEuler from being a Chinese-led director to industry co-construction and community autonomy.
"After the emergence of openEuler, R&D personnel and engineers have a place to contribute in China. Before there is consensus, people put some innovations in their own 'drawers', which can lead to duplication of effort. Now there is a consensus that everyone can contribute their innovation to the openEuler community and cultivate corresponding talents around it. Liu Wenqing, vice chairman of the openEuler committee, said.
At the Operating System Conference 2023, openEuler now supports all mainstream general-purpose computing architectures such as ARM, X86, and RISC-V, compared with the earlier days, which served Huawei's Kunpeng processors more. In the era of artificial intelligence, openEuler is also the first to support mainstream AI processors such as NVIDIA and Ascend. Through the unified management and scheduling of heterogeneous resources, openEuler can deeply integrate CPU and XPU, connect general computing power and AI computing power, and effectively improve the training and inference efficiency of large models.
The scene of the operating system conference 2023 Source: Observer.com
According to the information displayed by the Open Source Foundation at the conference, the contributor of openEuler is Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., and the contributor of OpenHarmony is Huawei Device Co., Ltd. In terms of positioning, one of the two is the "operating system of digital infrastructure" and the other is the "operating system in the era of the Internet of Everything", and it is difficult for outsiders to clarify the specific difference between the two.
Jiang Dayong explained to the observer network that in the past, the chip capability on the device side was weak and could only run a single operating system, but now as the chip capability becomes stronger and stronger, there may be multiple operating systems in a device, both Euler and Hongmeng. For user-oriented interaction, it may be better to use the HarmonyOS ecosystem, and for those who have higher requirements for certainty and reliability, it is better to use Euler. Now Euler and HarmonyOS have implemented distributed suite capabilities, and the underlying kernel is largely shared and can be interconnected with each other in the ecosystem.
"The roots of China's operating system are firmly established"
In previous operating system conferences, openEuler will announce the latest ecological construction status, and this year is no exception.
According to the data released at the conference, up to now, Euler has accumulated more than 6.1 million installed units. According to the forecast released by market research institute IDC at the meeting, in 2023, the new market share of openEuler in China's server operating system will reach 36.8%, CentOS/Red Hat will be 20.7%, Windows will be 19.3%, Ubuntu/Debian will be 10.1%, and other Linux operating systems will be 13.1%. This means that Euler has become the first basic software in China to achieve the first place in the new market share.
However, the 36.8% share performance is of much more significance to openEuler than simply improving its ranking.
Jiang Dayong explained to the observer that there is an "ecological rift" in the open source world, when the market share of an operating system exceeds 19%, it can form a self-circulation, if it does not reach 19% or even fall off a cliff, it may fail. For openEuler, a share of more than 20% is the key point, and a share of more than 35% is self-accelerating. "In the past, the development of ecological partners was community initiative, but now users and partners are beginning to take the initiative to find the community, and the significance of crossing the ecological inflection point may be greater. ”
Taking the financial industry as an example, he said that in 2023, openEuler will occupy more than 50% of the server operating system market in China's financial industry, "including open source versions, self-use versions and commercial versions, which are covered by 12 major joint-stock banks in China." From the perspective of the financial industry, from the original general business, the core business is now in use, and it has begun to develop from a small number of applications to large-scale use. ”
"In the new market, users take the initiative to choose openEuler as a technical route, which shows that the roots of China's operating system are established, and there is no clear support point for the root of the original operating system. Today, it can be seen from this figure that in 2023, 36.8% of users in the new domestic server operating system market will choose the Euler technology route. Since everyone has this consensus, the ecology will form the effect of active convergence and active adaptation. Liu Wenqing, vice chairman of the openEuler committee, said.
The scene of the operating system conference 2023 Source: Observer.com
"There is only one definition of success"
Although China's market share has increased significantly, many experts believe that openEuler is still difficult to say that it has succeeded.
"In my opinion, there is only one definition of openEuler's success, and that is international success. Xiong Wei, vice chairman of the TOC (Technical Review Committee) of the Open Atom Open Source Foundation, said, "There are some opportunities for internationalization, and there have been some events such as the suspension of (CentOS) in the past year or two. This not only affects the domestic but also the overseas, overseas is also looking for new alternative platforms, there are already some customers in consulting, and even some customers are doing verification, the future overseas is still very possible. ”
Jiang Dayong also told the observer network frankly in the interview, "Observing that all successful technologies and ecosystems in history must be globalized, if it is only a region, it is difficult to survive and develop for a long time." From the first day of its establishment, we believe that we want to be an international and global community, only in this way can we have vitality and long-term development. ”
In fact, Euler is committed to building an international open source assistance platform. Ni Guangnan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said in his speech at the meeting that the openEuler community has natively supported dozens of mainstream open source software covering multiple fields, such as Apache, SIF, and OPENCV, and that in terms of software security governance, the openEuler community has joined hands with international organizations such as openCHIN and OPENDELX to jointly formulate open source software supply chain security standards and contribute Chinese solutions to solve the governance and software security problems of open source communities.
The scene of the operating system conference 2023 Source: Observer.com
He also mentioned that today, the openEuler community has gathered more than 1,000 enterprises, including well-known enterprises such as Intel, and has tens of thousands of open source contributors and more than 100 special interest groups. It is believed that with the joint efforts of the world's open source scholars, openEuler will soon develop into a developer community with global influence.
"The operating system has been developed for decades, but in fact, there are some places that need to be changed, upgraded, and innovated on the basis. We need to make a new ecology, which is called the second choice at the beginning, and I hope to become a better choice after slowly doing a good job. We still insist on being one with the global ecosystem, and hope that through our efforts, we can not only serve the land of China, but also serve the world well and contribute some Chinese wisdom. Jiang Dayong said.
However, it should be pointed out that the development of the operating system ecology is inseparable from talents, and universities are the cradle of industrial talents.
At the conference, the Observer Network learned that in July last year, the Open Atom Fund officially launched the "Open Atom School Source Line", which cultivates open source talents for universities across the country by funding open source clubs, promoting open source courses, and setting up open source grants. As an important project group of the foundation, openEuler has in-depth cooperation with many universities such as Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, etc., and the relevant research results have been quickly practiced and verified through the open source community, creating a new model of industry-education integration and industry-university practice, and cultivating talents for China's basic software.