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Huawei’s HarmonyOS source code will be available to developers next year
Huawei previously started China's first open-source software foundation amid concerns the country might lose access to GitHub
This article originally appeared on ABACUS
Huawei says its homegrown operating system HarmonyOS will be fully open source by next August. This means the OS source code will be made available for developers to access, modify and share. Wang Chenglu, president of Huawei's consumer business software, made the announcement last Sunday during a Huawei Talk event in Shenzhen, local media reported.
Wang was giving a presentation on Huawei’s variant of Android called EMUI 10. He said HarmonyOS will eventually be available on smartphones, tablets and computers in China and overseas. But Android is still the company’s first choice, he added.
Huawei revealed HarmonyOS, or Hongmeng as it’s known in China, in August this year after finding itself under US trade restrictions barring it from including Google apps and services with new products. That same month, Wang made another announcement signaling Huawei’s interest in open source tech. The company said it will partner with other companies to set up China's first open-source software foundation.
The announcement came after the world’s largest host of open source code, Microsoft’s GitHub, restricted users in Iran, Syria and Crimea to comply with US sanctions. At the time, Chinese GitHub users were concerned about losing access to the site over the US-China trade war, but the site said its collaborative code repositories aren’t subject to export controls.
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