In order to reduce the reliance on foreign commercial operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and macOS, China recently launched the open source version "openKylin" of the domestic operating system Kylin OS.
Kylin OS, named after the Chinese mythical beast Qilin (麒麟), is owned by Kylinsoft, a subsidiary of state-owned China Electronics Corporation. The OS was originally created in 2001 by academics at the National University of Defense Technology to serve the Chinese military and other central government agencies.
Co-led by the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center and other departments, the “openKylin” project encourages greater engagement in the design and development of OSes via code contributions and other means.
This is the most recent effort by China's homegrown operating system to narrow the gap between Windows and macOS. Despite almost three decades of government-led investment, the market share of indigenous solutions remains negligible.
During the Gulf War and the Kosovo War in the 1990s, the United States disabled the air defense systems of the Iraqi and Yugoslav armies, respectively, causing China to see the need to develop its own operating system in order to secure its information security system.
Xu Guanhua, then Minister of Science and Technology, presided over the "Symposium on Developing China's Independent Operating System" (发展中国自主操作系统座谈会), where he made the point that China's information industry is highly reliant on Western technology, and that if this dependency were to be severed, the country would be in a situation comparable to that of Yugoslavia.
As requests for the development of China's own operating system became stronger, scientific research organizations, universities, and businesses joined the effort. Such efforts have yielded disappointing overall results, with Kylin being a bright spot, claiming that it and its variant, NeoKylin, have a 90% market share in the government sector, thanks to a push by the Beijing government in 2014 to replace foreign OSes with homegrown alternatives.
According to Statcounter, Microsoft controls around 85% of the desktop OS market as of June 2022 in China. Apple has rapidly expanded its market share in recent years, and it currently accounts for more than 8% of the market.
It's worth noting that the majority of indigenous solutions are based on open source OS initiatives such as Linux and Unix. For example, although the Kylin OS formerly claimed to have completely independent intellectual property rights, some professionals then pointed out that it has a high degree of similarity with FreeBSD and NetBSD.
BSD, or the Berkeley Software Distribution, is a discontinued OS based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley. Its descendants include FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD.
Kylin OS's close resemblance to BSD does not imply that it is a failure, as some of the most widely used operating systems are also based on Linux or Unix. For instance, Google's Android is developed on Linux, whereas Apple's iOS is built on Unix.
Linux or Unix is analogous to a fruit pit that produces "pulp" — drivers, applications, etc. — in order to grow and ultimately bear fruit, i.e., a successful operating system. However, indigenous operating systems are inferior to Windows and macOS in terms of usability, reliability, and ecological maturity.
Consequently, Chinese operating systems have a minimal share of the commercial OS market, despite their broad use by the military, the aerospace industry, and other secretive government agencies. The only way to make the "fruit" more desirable and valuable is to go open source.
There are enormous impediments to accelerating technological growth and ecological construction for domestic players if they simply focus on supplying state-owned firms. However, adopting open source might assist domestic firms in attracting more third-party contributors and developers, hence boosting acceptance and market share.
Kylin consequently rolled out OpenKylin. “Through the Openkylin community, we aim to leverage the power of open source to address some fundamental concerns... To achieve quick development of the KylinOS, I anticipate the emergence of commercial desktop operating systems and related services based on Openkylin." Zhu Chen, senior vice president of Kylin Software and leader of the Openkylin community, stated as much.
In addition, hardware, namely semiconductors, is crucial to the overall viability of the home operating system and is one of the major areas in which China strives for autonomy.
Lv Weifeng, general secretary of the China Software Industry Association, stated that the path to sustainable development is to create an environment that is both self-sufficient and manageable. "Domestic operating systems can help China achieve technical independence in critical areas and reduce its reliance on foreign solutions and services."
Currently, besides Kylin OS, mainstream operating systems include Unity OS, Deepin OS, as well as Huawei's OpenEuler and HarmonyOS.
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