Huawei is spamming open source community for its Harmony ecosystem (See Comment) | Hacker News Reader

Huawei is spamming open source community for its Harmony ecosystem (See Comment)

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67 pointsfernvenue23 comments

I don't think that can be considered spamming.

Apparently, there is a push by Huawei to try to upstream some of the adaptation they have done and test cases they have written so that some libraries are usable on their OS called OpenHarmony.

For reasons which are obscure to me, Huawei has apparently decided to open proposal issues before submitting the actual PRs. Honestly, it's not like they are asking much more than a "yes, we are interested" or "no, we aren't".

People here would probably be congratulating the company on its effort to be more open source oriented if it wasn't a Chinese one.

I like small details like the fake labels "Enhancement, Compatibility, Cross-platform" at the bottom of the issue to show that they don't take time fill those issues properly.

If you look at the PRs, you can see a shitshow where one unique commit dumps everything without any explanation, and where they duplicate the code of each library for no reason. Employees spamming projects with bad code shows that Huawei is a bad company. Shame.

I think it shows they didn't learn how to do it yet. Western companies had the same problem at first, now some of them know how to upstream a change. Huawei will learn to be a good citizen - they have to.

To be fair, it's their freedom to create a proposal to any author they want, and it's also the author's freedom to reject the PR.

But to be honest, even if the author rejects it, what will happen is most likely them forking the repo and make changes on top of it.

The issues mostly link to repositories that were created more than a year ago. So I think what happened is that they already forked the repo and made changes on top of it to get it to work on HarmonyOS, but there was no bandwidth for ongoing maintenance. Someone finally realized that this is unsustainable and demanded that the changes get upstreamed, but the people charged with implementing this directive don't know how you upstream changes. Hence this hamfisted attempt.

Most hits aren't even PRs, just issues requesting the repo maintainer to support HarmonyOS.

I hope you can read English.

I can, do you have a point you wanted to make?

Don't know why the link broken, so here's the link I want to submit: https://github.com/search?q=%22Proposal%20for%20OpenHarmony%...

Huawei is spamming Chinese language issues to pollute repos they eager to control.

https://github.com/search?q=%22%E9%B8%BF%E8%92%99%E5%8C%96%2...

If someone thinks the issues are bad, the pullrequests are worse. Everything is duplicated under an "OpenHarmony" directory plus a bunch of useless files.

Any idea what is the intended purpose? I mean, assuming good faith (which is not granted but plausible) how would this help them to build their distro.

They will get visibility. Having a lot of OSS that officially support HarmonyOS make it look more credible alternative.

This is a spammy, astroturfy way of promotion. That I don't like. But I like having options.

Sometimes it honours in a shitty way licenses like the GPLs, otherwise it's just cheap advertising for the early adopters.

Here's an example. This is the PR they created in lodash's GitHub repo:

https://github.com/lodash/lodash/pull/5980

I was tempted to defend them on the basis of the issues but, gosh, are the PRs bad.

On top of the duplication, the added files are somehow commented in Mandarin.

Well, if the US can spam ban hammer and promote monopoly, Huawei can defo use freedom of speech and expression to voice out their ecosystem freely.

Discussion on Chinese developer forum. Many are also enraged: https://v2ex.com/t/1131883

Is HarmonyOS available somewhere? Can I install it on my laptop and try it out?

via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenHarmony

https://gitee.com/openharmony

https://docs.openharmony.cn/pages/v5.1/en/OpenHarmony-Overvi... (ia: https://web.archive.org/web/20250516085148/https://docs.open... )

https://docs.openharmony.cn/pages/v5.1/zh-cn/release-notes/O... (ia: https://web.archive.org/web/20250516084749/https://docs.open... )

https://repo.huaweicloud.com/openharmony/os/5.1.0-Release/ (ia: https://web.archive.org/web/20250516091320/https://repo.huaw... )

Umm, if we do not assume malice or imcompetence, why would they need to adapt js libraries for an OS?

They have their own dialect of TS, they maybe changed something in a way that breaks compatibility.

Best reply to the PRs is What's OpenHarmony? Isn't that China's spyware in 5G towers that caused Covid?

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