On June 5, 2021, the 2021 China Developer Ecosystem Summit hosted by SegmentFault came to a successful conclusion. At the meeting, Liu Min, who is in charge of the operation of the open source community, made a speech on the theme of “the operation practice of the open source operating system”, and explained some knowledge of other sectors from the perspective of the market.
Guest: Liu Min, Head of Open Source Community Operation of YouQilin
Sort and publish shorthand: SegmentFault Editorial Department
Today I bring to you the “operation practice of the Qilin open source community”, first of all to introduce myself to you, I am Liu Min, from Qilin Software Co., Ltd., mainly responsible for the operation of the Qilin community. Today, my speech theme is mainly from the following four aspects: what is YouQilin, the development and operation mode of our YouQilin open source community, the introduction of the operation of our community platform and the case sharing of our community activities.
First of all, I would like to introduce the YouKylin open source community. Unicorn is an open source desktop operating system based on Ubuntu. It is a global open source project led by CCN Open Source Innovation Joint Laboratory and Unicorn Software Co., Ltd. CCN represents the Software and Integrated Circuit Promotion Center of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu; And our NUDT, which is the National University of Defense Technology.
We’ve gone from version 13.04 to an official Ubuntu spin-off, and our annual releases are synchronized with upstream releases around the world. We Unicorn open source operating system development goal is to do the world’s best Linux open source desktop operating system. Our version of the design concept is aimed to give the user more concise, excellence, comprehensive, and all the wisdom of the products, to provide users with a better user experience, excellent product quality and good adapter hardware and software compatibility and the ecological environment of the Linux operating system, to provide users with more guidelines and internationalized development mode. Our community goal is to spread open source in China and spread China to the world.
Up to now, our YouQilin community has released a total of 17 versions, including four long-term support versions, we will release a version every half a year, every two years a long-term support version. So far, we have downloaded more than 35 million times from our official website, not including Ubuntu’s official website, we have more than 200,000 active fans, we have more than 68 open source projects, and we have received more than 7,000 commits for our upstream contributions. At the same time, our YouQilin operating system is also an open source operating system recognized by the international community. We have contributed more than 3 million lines of code to the open source community. At the same time, our Kirin team is also the world’s first open source operating system release that supports ARM desktop, and the only Chinese operating system team invited to join Linaro community.
In addition, we have also made great efforts in campus promotion and integration of production and education. At present, we have established long-term cooperation with more than 50 domestic colleges and universities, and our YouQilin open source operating system has entered the teaching classroom and curriculum practice of many colleges and universities. In addition, the YouQilin community has also actively participated in the open source work of China, Japan and South Korea, and served as the Chinese enterprise leader of the open source reform committee of the three countries. At the same time, you qilin also won the “China excellent open source project” and “China computer association science and technology progress first prize”. In 2016, Kirin Software officially joined the Linux Foundation as a full member.
Next is the introduction of our community development operation. All of our main code repository is on GitLab on our internal network, but we will synchronize all the code to GitHub, Gitee and Launchpad in real time, which are three external hobbyist development platforms. Hobbyists can use GitHub, Gitee and Launchpad contribute to our open source projects, and the code we receive is synchronized to GitLab’s main repository on our Intranet. This is the address of our Unicorn project on GitHub. All of our operating system codes including application software are open source, so if you are interested in our project, you can download our codes for reference.
We currently have 68 public projects, 213 development contributors, and below are our PR and fork numbers for the past year. This is a project of our UKUI. UKUI is a desktop development environment based on Linux operating system developed by our Kirin team. It is integrated by default in our Unicorn open source operating system, and it is also integrated in our successful Kirin and Galaxy Unicorn commercial distribution. Currently the UKUI has 40 open sub-projects and 174 development contributors.
Our YouQilin community not only accepts contributions from the community, but also actively participates in the contributions of upstream communities, such as the GNOME community, KDE, Qt and Linux kernel, etc. So far, we have contributed more than 7,000 patches in total. At the same time, our self-developed projects have been accepted by the upstream community, such as OpenStack and CentOS.
We currently have 15 core contributors from the upstream community, including our kernel community, OpenStack community, Debian community, and Ubuntu community. We have three core code reviewers in the OpenStack community, which includes four official projects and 50 package review permissions. Here are some of our contributions to the Linux kernel community, where we have a copyright@kylin module; As well as our contribution to the OpenStack community, we have contributed more than 100,000 lines of code to the OpenStack community since version F. Among our contributions to version T in 2019 and version U in 2020, Kylincloud’s contribution ranks first in China. Fourth in the world. This is a contribution to the Debian community. We helped to complete the first official ARM64 release in the world, and we are the only Chinese representative among the major participants in this project. This is our contribution to the Ubuntu community. There are 56 open source projects that have been included in Debian and Ubuntu, including system installation, input framework, control panel, file manager and other applications. All of our upstream received projects have also been incorporated into the Ubuntu distribution.
In the context of some of our community’s contributions, we have found that the most important thing in community development, after the exchange of code, is communication. In addition to the aforementioned developer platforms — GitHub, CodeCloud and Launchpad — we also have the IRC channel, which is used a lot by developers, and our developers are also on it. We also have mailing lists and we have regular IRC online meetings and Google Meeting online meetings and occasionally offline meetings.
In addition, we also have an active testing platform. Our system testing includes integration testing of the entire ISO image as well as software package testing and hardware testing. In addition to our official daily release testing, we also hold regular testing events with other distributions, including testing weeks with Ubuntu and Kubuntu. In addition, in the document and translation platform, we have contributed to the upstream translation of more than 30,000 entries and more than 100 open source technical documents. This is an Ubuntu translation platform, and all Ubuntu translation contributions are available to everyone. In addition to using Ubuntu’s translation platform, we have also built our own translation platform, Weblate, which works well with GitHub and GitLab. We have received a lot of contributions from foreign users on our Weblate translation platform, and we are now translating in 105 languages, including English, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Polish and our Tibetan minority.
Next is the introduction of the operation of our community platform. At present, we operate more than 20 official account platforms. According to the different user groups of each operating platform, we classify each platform into different positions, including official media information platform, code hosting platform, experience sharing platform and video sharing and interactive exchange platform.
First of all, I would like to introduce our official website of YouQilin. Our official website mainly includes YouQilin’s information, download of the new version mirror, community activities and video area. Our daily average visit is 2500 times, and the average daily visit before and after the release of the new version is 16000 times. YouQilin’s forum is a platform for system feedback and resource sharing, as well as interactive communication. At present, the number of users of our forum is 56,000, and the cumulative number of posts is 120,000.
UKUI’s official website provides a separate UKUI project download and its development and participation. This is an introduction of our operation in Station B. In addition to the operation of traditional media platforms, we have also expanded the operation of many new media platforms.
Teacher Hu (Hu Xiaoman) also introduced that many of their new media operations are very successful, and I will learn more from her in the future. At present, our operation time in the B station is relatively short. We only put 27 videos, but our total playback volume has reached 260,000 times. The video of new product introduction which has the highest playback volume has reached 130,000 times. The video content we uploaded at Site B mainly contains the promotion and introduction of the new version, as well as some installation of the system, such as the introduction of the use of some software tutorials. At the same time, during the registration period of the Qylin Cup Software Competition held last month, we also conducted seven matches of live coaching on the B station, and the cumulative number of viewers also exceeded ten thousand people.
Finally, I would like to share with you the case of the activities of the Qilin community. Our Qilin community has held more than 100 community activities, including Qilin Cup software competition, new version release party, roundtable communication meeting and CN technology exchange meeting, etc.
Next to introduce you to our party, we will have 2 times a year released a new version, is in April and October, the new version released, we will hold a 3-6 release party activities, mainly and students in colleges and universities is given priority to, with optimal kylin operating system is a new version of the experience, sharing and user feedback is given priority to, Share some new features of the new version with college students, and lead students to have a deeper understanding of Linux open source operating system and Linux open source culture. This is our 14, 15 year launch party;
In 2016, we invited Academician Ni Guangnan and Academician Liao Xiangke to participate in the launch party of our common support version. This is the ’17 and’ 18 event sharing;
Release Party 19 is a Hexon-style event of the United Open Source Society’s release party, allowing students to access the hackathon platform directly through the browser and experience our latest Unicode OS. At the same time, we also guided students to contribute their first line of code on GitHub and Gitee (code cloud) platforms, and to submit their first open source contribution. Up to now, our launch party has gone through 23 provincial administrative regions, accounting for 70% of the provincial administrative regions in China. So far, we have cooperated with more than 50 universities.
Next, we will introduce our Qilin Cup software competition. In the past, our qylin cup software competition was only held for undergraduates of the university of national defense science and technology, and has been held for nine consecutive years. This year, the 10th qylin cup software competition has been upgraded to the national competition, aiming at undergraduates, graduate students, doctors, and all university students can participate in the competition. We invited China Open Source Software Promotion Alliance, China Software Industry Association and Open Atom Open Source Foundation as guiding units for the Kylin Cup Software Competition. Kylin Community, Kylin Software Co., Ltd., National University of Defense Technology and Kylin Software College are the organizers. The co-organizers are from ten high quality universities in China, including Peking University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Xi ‘an University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nankai University, Lake University, Central South University, etc. Our partner communities include Sifl, CSDN, Mulan Open Source Community, Linux China and so on; The Steering Committee of our competition consists of 4 academicians and 1 expert, including Academician Ni Guangnan, Academician Wushou Slamu, Academician Zheng Weimin, Academician Liao Xiangke, and Chairman Lu Shouqun of China OSS Promotion Alliance. At the same time, our expert committee also invited 22 professors and experts from open source application related fields, including the deans or professors of computer schools from the 10 universities mentioned above and experts in open source field, as well as our teacher Zhuang Bianwei. During the registration period of the Qilin Cup Software Competition, we held 6 events in many universities, including National University of Defense Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Tianjin University and so on. At the same time, we also held 7 online coaching sessions. As I mentioned before, we held 7 online coaching sessions at Station B, and the cumulative number of viewers exceeded 10,000. We have also put the video replay of the tournament coaching on station B.
At present our qilin cup software competition registration has been closed, now in the preliminary stage. There are 102 teams from 35 domestic universities, including Peking University, National University of Defense Technology, Fudan University and Central South University. The total number of participants is 256. The Qilin Cup software competition included 95 different topics such as desktop applications, document management and small manual tools.
That’s all for my speech today. Thank you.