On May 8, 2026, led by independent developer “Bubu”OpenHarmony-NET/OpenHarmony.AvaloniaThe project officially announced that it would stop updating and be archived. This project is a key exploration project in the .NET ecosystem to adapt the Avalonia cross-platform UI framework to the OpenHarmony system. It was once considered an important bridge between .NET developers and the Harmony ecosystem. The incident was triggered by a cooperation dispute and triggered extensive discussions in the domestic open source community and .NET developer circle.
To sum up in one sentence: Huawei found an open source team for in-depth cooperation in the early stages of the project. After "borrowing" the core technology solution, Huawei turned around and kicked out the original team and replaced it with low-cost outsourcing.
The complete story of the incident
The developer "Bubu" is a senior developer in the .NET community. Out of personal hobbies, he will use his spare time to promote the adaptation of the Avalonia framework and Hongmeng system from 2024. The goal is to allow .NET developers to directly develop Hongmeng native applications.
The project made key progress in early 2025, realizing the basic operation of the .NET NativeAOT runtime on Hongmeng, real-device rendering of Avalonia UI, and even completing the compatibility test of the MAUI program on Hongmeng. It was once regarded as a breakthrough point for the Hongmeng .NET ecosystem. In July 2025, Avalonia officially negotiated cooperation with Huawei, planning to promote Hongmeng adaptation work, and promised that after the cooperation is reached, full-time or part-time developer "Bubu" will continue to lead the adaptation project. During the months-long technical docking, the two parties held meetings, changed codes, and adjusted parameters. The open source team almost worked for Huawei for free with the intensity of "quasi-employees." Out of trust in the cooperation between Avalonia and Huawei, the developer transferred the project from a public warehouse to closed-source development and suspended external updates in order to avoid conflicts of interest and cooperate with the confirmation of technical specifications.
But just when the technical research was completed and the plan was basically finalized, the trend changed. Since then, the cooperation has been postponed many times. It was not until early 2026 that a number of outsourcing companies contacted developers through Bilibili and blogs, seeking to undertake the Avalonia Hongmeng adaptation project. Only then did the developers learn that during negotiations with Avalonia, Huawei had used the technical information provided by Avalonia to openly bid on domestic suppliers on the bidding platform. The developer confirmed that the technical details in the bidding information are exactly the cooperation information provided by Avalonia to Huawei. While Huawei is still nominally negotiating with Avalonia for cooperation, it has actually diverted adaptation needs through the bidding.
In May 2026, the Avalonia development group discovered that an outsourcing company (iSoftStone) posted a recruitment information for "Avalonia Framework Engineer" on Boss Direct Recruitment, and the outsourcing company had successfully won the bid for the Hongmeng adaptation project. After confirming with Dong Bin, a core member of Avalonia, the developer confirmed the fact that the project was taken over by an outsourcing company, and finally decided to terminate the project.
The developer issued an announcement on GitHub, announcing that all projects under the OpenHarmony-NET organization will stop updating and the developed content will no longer be made public. The announcement mentioned that the subsequent adaptation work will most likely be open sourced by the winning outsourcing company in the name of a "certain SIG organization". The developers refused to make their early results public for free and only required companies that subsequently used the relevant code to abide by the MIT agreement and retain the original author's signature.
This is technical white prostitution
Some analysts believe that this is a "technical whoring" of private open source developers disguised as a business process.
It is not an infringement in the legal sense (there is no direct copying of the code), but in terms of open source ethics, business credit, and developer rights protection, it is a typical "free prostitution" behavior. The core loss of developer Bubu is not "not getting money", but that his trust was betrayed, his early exploratory investment was harvested for free, and his personal achievements were "whitewashed" by a third party through the bidding process.
Bubu originally promoted open source projects purely as a personal hobby. After July 2025, he took the initiative because Avalonia officially discussed cooperation with Huawei and promised to "employ him full-time/part-time to continue adapting after the cooperation is concluded."Stop public development and move to a closed source warehouse.This behavior itself is that he gave up the feedback, contribution and exposure opportunities of the open source community in order to cooperate with potential business cooperation. In essence, he paid the opportunity cost and time cost in advance for the partner.
Cooperation negotiations between Huawei and Avalonia have been delayed for a long time, but they are bidding on domestic suppliers on the public bidding platform with the technical information provided by Avalonia (including the adaptation direction explored by Bubu in the early stage). The technical details in the bidding information are exactly the cooperation information provided by Avalonia to Huawei, and Bubu's preliminary work is one of the important sources of this technical information.
In other words: the partner used the trust and early investment of the developers to complete the verification of the technical solution, and then turned around and handed the project to a third-party outsourcing company through public bidding. In the end, the developer's achievements were used for free and no rights were obtained. The difference between it and ordinary free prostitution is that it is more hidden and more harmful to the ecology.
Huawei's operating logic is very simple: the original team has technical pursuits, which is expensive; the outsourcing team only needs to copy the gourd, which is cheap.
Huawei made a shrewd calculation: the core solution has been "set up", and now that the logic is clear, the rest of the hard work can be done by just finding an obedient and cheap outsourcer. As for the honor of the open source community and the copyright of the original author? In front of Huawei, it seems not worth mentioning.
The dignity of giants should not be based on "harvesting"
Huawei has always given people the image of "valuing research and development" and "respecting talents." But the exposed behavior this time shows its ruthless side in business expansion.
This is not the first time that a major company has carried out "dimension reduction harvesting" of the open source community. Many major companies, under the guise of supporting open source, actually use the open source community as a free "solution incubator" and "human test bank."
This behavior is devastating to the ecology:
It chills the hearts of developers: If originality is not as good as "Chinese" and innovation is not as good as "free prostitution", who is willing to do those thankless low-level R&D?
Bad money drives out good money: When low-cost outsourcing replaces hard-core originality, the subsequent quality and evolution capabilities of the project are greatly reduced, and it is the users who ultimately pay the bill.
Collapse of trust: Open source is about Peer-to-Peer trust. The "empty-handed" approach of big companies is making the domestic open source environment increasingly isolated.