openEuler brings China's enterprise Linux ambitions to the desktop

Surprisingly few organizations were promoting Linux distros at Open Source Summit Europe.

The only dedicated stands we found belonged to two Chinese projects, with openEuler occupying the larger booth.

For users accustomed to Western enterprise distros, openEuler may be a less familiar name, but it has an impressive history.

It's the modern free community version of Huawei's EulerOS, a version of which achieved official official UNIX™ certification . openEuler is no longer a solely Huawei project, though.

Since then, it's been opened up, and it is now run by the OpenAtom Foundation .

OpenAtom was co-founded in 2020 by Huawei along with some other big Chinese names, such as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent.

Another of the co-founders was Inspur, which formerly developed its own distro, K/UX – a version of which also achieved official UNIX™ certification .

Inspur K/UX won Unix certification in February 2016, and EulerOS seven months later.

K/UX's Unix certification expired in 2019.

A few months later, in May 2019, the US placed wider sanctions on Huawei .

It is possible that the fresh restrictions on American sales prompted Huawei's interest in closer co-operation with other companies in the Chinese Linux space.

As far as we can see, there were no further versions of K/UX after version 3.

As additional motivation for cooperation, both EulerOS and K/UX were originally based on CentOS Linux, and of course, in December 2020, the CentOS Project announced it would shift its focus from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream .

The openEuler community has taken the platform in new directions.