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Chinese open-source foundations and OpenAtom finances

Source file: docs/CN-FOUNDATIONS.md · updated 2026-11-08

Research note, 2026-11-03. Evidence levels per METHODOLOGY.md §4. Self-reported figures are C unless they come from an official filing.

1. OpenAtom Open Source Foundation (开放原子开源基金会)

• Governance. National non-profit foundation, founded June 2020, registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, supervised by MIIT. Founding donors: Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, Inspur, Qihoo 360, Tencent, China Merchants Bank. Donors sit in four tiers. Sources: https://huanqiu.com/article/45RxvLVHOas (B); https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%BC%80%E6%94%BE%E5%8E%9F%E5%AD%90%E5%BC%80%E6%BA%90%E5%9F%BA%E9%87%91%E4%BC%9A/53481350 (C).
• Information disclosure. Annual work reports for 2020–2023 are listed at https://openatom.cn/information/work (A, page). The 2022 and 2023 PDFs are image-only scans: pdftotext returned no text. We need OCR before we can extract the financials. We found no 2024 or 2025 report on that page.
• Finances.
• More than CNY 600 million raised cumulatively since 2020. Xinhua, 25 Jun 2026, https://www.news.cn/info/20260625/a9b84c78ac8946c6a7e37bbae91513af/c.html. Self-reported via press: C.
• 198 donor organisations, of which 55 are platinum, gold or silver. 9 new unrestricted donors in 2026. 12 project donations renewed (same source, C).
• We found no audited breakdown of income or spending.
• Projects.
• 2020: 7 founding projects, including OpenHarmony and XuperChain. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/234694705 (C)
• Jul 2025: more than 60 projects passed TOC admission, 41 in incubation, 8 newly donated (AI, embodied intelligence, blockchain). http://www.news.cn/sci-tech/20250725/fad2cf09702c410985ce5318d5c587cf/c.html (B)
• 2025 report: 52 projects in incubation. OpenHarmony and openEuler graduated. OpenHarmony: more than 10k contributors, more than 1,500 certified products. openEuler: more than 24k contributors, more than 16m installs. https://dpiche.com/index/archives/81.html (third-party relay of the report, C)
• Jun 2026: 58 projects in 18 fields. 6 new projects: xLLM, JoySafety, openSupOS, OpenLET, 电鸿 IoT OS, LoongArch binary translator. Mulan licence family donated (Mulan PSL v2 is OSI-approved; reported in use by more than 330k projects). Xinhua 2026 (B)
• Priorities by year.
• 2020–22: OS, blockchain, basic software.
• 2024: developers + academia (首届开源技术学术大会).
• 2025: "全栈协同"; AI, quantum, BCI, embodied intelligence.
• 2026: AI agents, LoongArch/chips, robotics, industrial control.
• Other output. 《中国开源发展深度报告（2025）》, compiled by the OpenAtom secretariat, June 2025: https://www.163.com/dy/article/L0J5CCN50511B8LM.html (B)

2. KAIYUANSHE (开源社)

• Governance. A volunteer community founded in 2014, with an elected board (理事会), working groups and a finance group. We found no registered legal entity or 年检 record (verify). Funding comes from corporate sponsorship of COSCon plus small donations. Source: 2021 annual report https://kaiyuanshe.github.io/document/kys-report-2021/2021%20%E5%BC%80%E6%BA%90%E7%A4%BE%E5%B9%B4%E5%BA%A6%E6%8A%A5%E5%91%8A.pdf (A for the text; figures C).
• FY2021 finances (self-reported, C):

The report itself flags missing reimbursement rules; budgeting was planned for 2022.

• Priorities. COSCon, the 中国开源年度报告 (published since 2015), open-source education, open-source risk governance, international links (ASF, Near). See COSCON-THEMES.md.
• Gap. We have not yet fetched the FY2022–FY2025 annual reports. They are probably at kaiyuanshe.github.io/document/kys-report-20XX/.

3. COPU (中国开源软件推进联盟, China OSS Promotion Union)

• Governance. An industry alliance chaired by Lu Shouqun (陆首群), who runs regular meetings (例会). Vice-chair Liu Peng (刘澎). Members: companies, universities and institutes. Sources: https://cosspu.org.cn/osinfo/shownews.php?id=277 (A, minutes 2025-07-08); http://copu-oss.org.cn/download/ (A).
• Output.
• The annual 中国开源发展蓝皮书 (2021–2025), compiled by the Beijing Open Source Innovation Committee with CSDN, OpenAtom, CCID, ISCAS and others, published on GitCode: https://gitcode.net/COPU/2023 , https://gitcode.com/choss_skw/2025book (A).
• 《2024中国开源发展现状》, released 2025-02-13 (A, download page).
• Liu Peng's 2022 claim that China is "near world level in some fields": https://blog.csdn.net/csdnopensource/article/details/125943982 (B).
• Finances. Nothing public found (gap).

4. CCF ODC (CCF开源发展委员会)

• A committee of the China Computer Federation. It reportedly focuses on academic open source (GitLink platform, 开源之夏 summer programme). We could not verify the founding date or chair this pass: D, lead only.

5. CAICT, LF APAC/China, OSCHINA/Gitee

• CAICT and Gitee/OSCHINA are already registered in data/stakeholders.json; nothing new this pass. LF APAC/China was not researched (budget).

6. Comparison

7. Findings

1. FACT (C/B). OpenAtom holds most of the money in Chinese open source. The roughly CNY 600m it reports for 2020–26 is about 1,000 times KAIYUANSHE's CNY 0.6m FY21 income.
2. FACT (B). OpenAtom's portfolio follows industrial-policy priorities: OS, LoongArch, chips, embodied AI, industrial control. Its 2026 conference coverage does not mention international cooperation.
3. FACT (A). KAIYUANSHE is the community-side actor with international ties: it co-ran COSCon'20 with the ASF and received a Near Foundation donation in 2021. It publishes detailed but unaudited finances.
4. FACT (B). OpenAtom now stewards the Mulan licence family, which includes the OSI-approved Mulan PSL v2. That makes it a concrete counterpart for EU licence work (EUPL compatibility).
5. INFERENCE. Disclosure is weak. OpenAtom's work reports are scanned images and stop at 2023 online, which limits verifiable comparison. Next steps: OCR, and the 民政部 慈善中国 / 社会组织 registry from a CN IP.
6. INFERENCE. For EU–China cooperation, the low-risk entry points are community and academic: KAIYUANSHE/COSCon and CCF ODC 开源之夏 alongside EU OSPO networks and Eclipse/ASF. Engaging OpenAtom means engaging an MIIT-supervised industrial-policy vehicle, which needs economic-security screening.
7. INFERENCE. Both sides have converged on AI open source (COSCon'25 "Open Intelligence"; OpenAtom's AI-agent datasets). That makes open-source AI governance and licensing the likeliest shared agenda.

8. Open items

• OCR the OpenAtom 2020–2023 work-report PDFs (copies on the server at /tmp/oa).
• Fetch KAIYUANSHE reports for 2022–2025.
• Verify CCF ODC.
• Check the Ministry of Civil Affairs 年检 records.

Update 3 Nov 2026 — OpenAtom statutory annual work reports (OCR)

Source: OpenAtom 2022 and 2023 年度工作报告 (annual-inspection filings to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, from the foundation's disclosure page; scanned PDFs, OCR with tesseract chi_sim, text in sources/ocr/). Evidence A (official filing; OCR, figures to be re-read on the image before publication).

• 2023 board items include a 20.3M-yuan budget adjustment for the foundation's funding-service centre and 3.689M yuan (Sep–Dec) for OpenHarmony CI/CD infrastructure.
• Fact: OpenAtom's donation income is 100% domestic in both years. Inference: this contrasts with the Xinhua "¥600M+ since 2020" figure (C): the two filed years total ~¥139M, so the cumulative claim needs the 2020–2021 and 2024–2025 filings to be checked.

OpenAtom: funding and openness (3 Nov 2026)

Sources. OpenAtom's statutory 年度工作报告 (annual-inspection filings to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, printed from zwxt.mca.gov.cn) for 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. All four are image-only PDFs on https://openatom.cn/information/work. We ran OCR on the server (pdftoppm -r 200, tesseract chi_sim+eng). The text is in sources/ocr/openatom-20{20,21,22,23}-work-report.ocr.txt. Each year's totals were cross-checked: income minus expenses equals the change in net assets, or the sub-items add up to the stated total. Evidence is A (OCR): the figures must be re-read on the page image before publication. No 2024 or 2025 report is published on the disclosure page (checked 3 Nov 2026). The 慈善中国 and chinanpo.mca.gov.cn search pages are JS-only and were not reachable from our hosts. Coverage gap: 2024–2025.

Finances by year (CNY)

¹ Includes about CNY 30M paid in at founding (cash flow: "other operating receipts" of 30.07M in 2020); this is the 原始基金. ² The same figure appears in both 2020 and 2021, and both years' income totals add up with it. The duplication may be real or an OCR artefact; check on the image.

Named donors (large-donation tables, partial).

• 2020: Huawei Technologies 6.0M; Hangzhou Qulian (趣链) 3.0M, both unrestricted. Related-party pages list Baidu and Inspur among the founders and main donors.
• 2021: of 11.2M listed, JD (Chongqing) 1.0M and Shenzhen Kaihong Digital (深开鸿) 3.5M were earmarked for OpenHarmony.
• 2022: openEuler-earmarked donations from 湖南麒麟信安 3.0M, 江苏润和 1.0M and others. Event sponsorship: Intel (China) and others for the 2022 summit.
• 2023: Huawei Device 15.772M; Huawei Technologies 12.08M; ChinaSoft International 8.1M. These listed donations total 35.952M, 48% of the year's donations. Related-party pages list Tencent Cloud, Huawei and Qihoo 360.
• Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and ByteDance amounts are not itemised in the OCR text. They are under the large-donation threshold or illegible.

Spending by project.

2022: 5 projects, 17,374,112.86 in total.

2022 large payments:

• OpenHarmony code-hosting fees: 1.63M.
• OpenHarmony item (payee illegible): 3.64M, 10.4% of charitable spending.
• OpenHarmony development boards: 0.40M.
• openEuler → The Linux Foundation: about 1.48M (4.22%; purpose illegible).

2023 (8 projects, 93,651,438.85 in total):

2023 large payments (20.56M, 21%):

• Huawei Cloud services for OpenHarmony: 6,485,400.
• OpenHarmony code hosting: 1.65M.
• Event agency 中青旅联科: 5.91M + 2.24M.
• CCTV.com promotion: 1.42M.
• China National Convention Center (openEuler): 2.86M.

Rough classification of 2023 spending.

• About 47% was directly open-source-specific engineering and infrastructure (OpenHarmony, openEuler, ecosystem platform).
• About 24% was events, competitions and campus programmes.
• About 29% went to "other public-interest" activity, mixed.
• Admin was 3.95% of total expenditure.

Reconciliation with Xinhua's "¥600M+ raised since 2020" (C). The filed donations for 2020–23 total ¥223.6M; total income is ¥270.5M. Reaching ¥600M by mid-2026 would need about ¥330M more in 2024 to mid-2026, roughly ¥130M a year. That is possible if 2023's growth continued, but no filing supports it. The figure may also count pledges or project donations booked elsewhere, such as the Shenzhen service centre.

Projects × licence (repos linked from https://openatom.cn/projects, checked 3 Nov 2026 via GitHub/Gitee APIs and LICENSE headers)

OSI column: Y = OSI-approved licence. Apache-2.0, MIT, BSD-3-Clause, GPL-2.0/3.0 and MulanPSL-2.0 are all OSI-approved. MulanPSL-2.0 is confirmed at https://opensource.org/license/mulanpsl-2-0 and in the SPDX list (isOsiApproved: true). MulanPSL-1.0 and the Mulan Public License (MulanPubL) are not OSI-approved.

Findings

1. FACT (A, OCR). OpenAtom's filed income for 2020–23 is ¥270.5M. Of this, ¥223.6M was donations, all from Chinese companies, with zero foreign donations in every year. Spending rose from ¥3.4M (2020) to ¥97.5M (2023). Net assets were about ¥130M at end-2023. No filing exists for 2024–25.
2. FACT (A, OCR). OpenAtom also receives government money: a ¥1.46M subsidy in 2020 and in 2021, and ¥20.7M in 2023, of which ¥20.2M was restricted to the 开源项目生态培育平台 (ecosystem cultivation platform). The filings do not name the granting body; MIIT is likely (inference). This is the only part of OpenAtom's income that belongs in public-funding totals.
3. FACT (A, OCR). OpenAtom is financially a Huawei-anchored vehicle. In 2023, Huawei Device and Huawei Technologies gave ¥27.85M, 37% of all donations. OpenHarmony took 28% of charitable spending, and ¥6.49M of it was paid to Huawei Cloud. INFERENCE: part of the donated money flows back to the donor as cloud-service revenue. Related-party disclosure covers this, but it is not arm's-length.
4. FACT (A, OCR). Roughly half of 2023 charitable spending went to open-source engineering and infrastructure (OpenHarmony, openEuler, the platform). About a quarter went to events, competitions and campus/talent programmes, which promote "open source" but produce no code. Admin overhead is low (3.95%).
5. FACT (B, repo check). Every OpenAtom project we checked (35 repos) is published under an OSI-approved licence: Apache-2.0, MulanPSL-2.0, MIT, BSD-3, or GPL-2.0/3.0. MulanPSL-2.0 is OSI-approved. MulanPSL-1.0 and MulanPubL are not, and we found no OpenAtom project using them. Licences for model and robotics projects (Mobius, HaiRuo, OpenLoong…) remain unchecked.
6. INFERENCE. "Open source" applies to OpenAtom's upstream code, not to the products it feeds:
7. HarmonyOS NEXT is proprietary on top of OpenHarmony.
8. Commercial Kylin, UOS and EulerOS distributions are sold on top of openEuler and openKylin.
9. XTS certification and OpenHarmony device certification are brand and compatibility programmes, not code.
10. The foundation funds the open commons that national-champion commercial stacks depend on.
11. INFERENCE: classification for data/funding. Donation records are private corporate philanthropy. Keep them as instrument_type: donation, summable: false, and exclude them from the government total. They can be shown as a separate "private/foundation OSS funding" line. The 2023 ¥20.7M government subsidy is public, disbursed and OSS-specific. Record it as a grant via an intermediary (OpenAtom), but leave it summable: false until the granting body and the OCR figure are verified on the image. OpenHarmony adoption subsidies (Shenzhen etc.) are recorded separately and must not be double-counted with this.
12. INFERENCE. The ¥600M+ Xinhua figure (C) cannot be reconciled with the filings for 2020–23 (¥270M in income). It should be cited only as "reported by Xinhua". Next step: get the 2024/2025 年检 filings from chinanpo.mca.gov.cn via a CN-IP browser.