Union Tech, the developer of the China-made UOS operating system, today announced that it has joined forces with Chinese companies, including AliCloud, to build the OpenAnolis community and launch Anolis OS 8 in the second quarter.
The community's short-term goal is to develop Anolis OS 8 as a CentOS replacement, rebuilding a system compatible with major international Linux vendors, with a planned release in the second quarter of 2021.
The system is an open-source, neutral, and open community release version that supports international and domestic mainstream chip architectures and is fully compatible with CentOS.
CentOS 8, on the other hand, will not have further update at the end of 2021 after development is complete, with no more maintenance or security fixes.
AliCloud mentioned that in the past, China lacked a native Linux operating system upstream community so users can only get code from Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, and other overseas sites, making the need to establish a local open-source operating system platform imminent.
The OpenAnolis community was launched last September by AliCloud, which joined forces with companies including Union Tech, Phytium, Hygon, Zhaoxin, Loongson, and China Telecom's Cloud Computing Branch and China Unicom Cloud Data Co. to form a council to build an open-source community for the operating system.
In addition, Union Tech will release a commercial version based on the community version.
ReactOS, an open source alternative for Windows, releases version 0.4.13
