Huawei Honor Smart Screen, world's first terminal for Huawei's HarmonyOS, revealed in Dongguan, South China's Guangdong Province on Saturday. Photo: Courtesy of Huawei

China's first open-source foundation will be launched in about a month or two, said Huawei after it released its open-source HarmonyOS on Friday.

 The foundation, yet to be named, will be led by Huawei and is seen as a follow-up step for China to build a software developer ecosystem and a complete industry chain.

China's first open-source foundation will officially start operation in a month or two, Wang Chenglu, president of the Huawei Consumer Business Group software division, told the Global Times on Saturday.

 The foundation is expected to provide a lucrative environment for Chinese software developers, and gather their strength to help the country's electronic information industry to break their bottlenecks in chipset making and OS development, according to observers.

"Huawei will continue to lead a broader effort to build China's software developer ecosystem and complete industry chain for the electronic information industry, rather than just launch its OS," Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Beijing-based Information Consumption Alliance, told the Global Times. 

The Chinese telecommunications giant released its much-anticipated operating system HarmonyOS on Friday amid the US ban and escalating China-US trade war.

Huawei Honor Smart Screen, the world's first terminal for HarmonyOS, was revealed on Saturday, according to the press release the company sent to the Global Times. The terminal is equipped with three self-developed chips, a built-in lifting AI camera and a 55-inches screen with high resolution.

Huawei Honor Smart Screen's standard edition is priced at 3,799 yuan ($538), and the Pro version is at 4,799 yuan.

Honor phones accounted for 11.02 percent of the total new increasing of Android phones in China market in the first half of 2019, ranking the second after the Huawei phones, Richard Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei consumer business, said during the launch event, according to media reports.

Honor's goal is to become the first or second brand in China, and among the top four in the world, Yu said.

HarmonyOS is an open-source system, but without the support of most companies and developers, it can't grow at a rapid pace and neither can the industry, Xiang said.

The foundation will draw lessons of the operating model from similar foreign foundations, and rank the developers based on their contribution to the community, the Global Times learned.

The largest open-source foundation in the world is Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which provides a total of $2 billion open-sourced software products to billions of users across the world.