HarmonyOS (pre NEXT) has some really interesting ideas in it, where the software architecture is backed by a distributed bus DSoftBus. So apps and appliances ki

HarmonyOS (pre NEXT) has some really interesting ideas in it, where the software architecture is backed by a distributed bus DSoftBus. So apps and appliances kind of semi-seamlessly mesh across systems in interesting ways. I'd love to see & learn more & get real hands-on experience with HarmonyOS. Alas the story was already flakey. You can sign up for a free Huawei developer account, by sending them your passport and bank account information... Which seems like a tall ask to me for a company anywhere on this planet, & this is low on the list of companies I feel I can trust. They released a ton of open source code as OpenHarmony in September 2020, and that's been iterating along. China literally made its first open source software foundation to support the effort & carry it forward: OpenAtom, with all the big names lined up to support it. There's computers, medical, vehicle, and energy applications of the tech, mostly under development or starting to be released. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAtom_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAtom_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenHarmony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenHarmony Hypothetically we can go download the oodles of source ourselves & play with OpenHarmony. But I haven't found any guides or documentation to show how it's done. Progress seems steady on; 4.1 is due soon. https://gitee.com/openharmony https://gitee.com/openharmony HarmonyOS NEXT sounds like it is an interesting real series of next steps towards their homegrown imagined world. But it also is very unclear to me what the future relation is between Huawei's HarmonOS NEXT and OpenHarmony is going to look like. So far it seems like OpenHarmony is kind of being left behind, and that Huawei is building more or less a better newer commercial OS that scales up and down in size, that maybe is somewhat intercompatible with existing OpenHarmony, but which is not generally available like OpenHarmony was. I could be totally wrong, maybe the open source will continue, but I've seen this NEXT news more with alarm & concern than hope. I do wish the west was paying a little more attention, and assessing Harmony on Harmony's ground, versus endlessly bickering about Linux and Android. Ark UI is a vaguely interesting extension to typescript for making UIs; I see a QT :: C++ vibe happening again. DSoftBus is conceptually super interesting as a ubiquitous & pervasive computing platform that's light-years past Matter's first filing steps; rather than carefully cobbled together Matter devices from a huge SDK and elaborate schemas & protocols, there's a connected object bus that promises to kind of just work & integrate elegantly with everyday development of everything you do. There's interesting stuff here, and frankly OSes are in a long boring doldrums of not doing much. It's a pity that just getting started is so unclear, so hard. And it'll be interesting to see how OlenAtom/OpenHarmony gets treated going forwards, whether the fellowship is broken or whether these companies can help each other succeed together.