The popular web server Nginx started in Russia almost 20 years ago. Nobody would have used the software of such dubious origin if it was closed-source. Being open-source allowed many more eyeballs and developers which increased trust in the project.

With the current geopolitical landscape, projects from Russia, China and increasingly the United States must be open-source to become widely used and trusted.

If China-based JingOS aren't developing their work publicly, for most developers it may as well not exist.

Wouldn't a license that allows seeing and building the code, but not redistribution be sufficient for that?

No, because it would add the friction of each licensee having to audit the code themselves rather than the crowd sourced approach of open source.

No.

Looks like it will eventually "step by step"[1]

> JingOS is based on Ubuntu 20.04, KDE v5.75, Plasma Mobile 5.20. We will replace the framework from Plasma Mobile to JDE(Jing Desktop Environment) later this year.

> The project will open-source step by step on GitHub: JingOS-team

[1]: https://forum.jingos.com/t/jingos-roadmap-v1-0-published-on-...

Will update Github Project before Jan 31. And the OS will be free forever. https://www.jingos.com/faq/

That page doesn't really answer the question.

It links to a forum FAQ which does: https://forum.jingos.com/t/faq-about-jingos/243

If they comply fully with the GPL then this could be a great new linux distro! If they don't then I will avoid it.

According to their FAQ they plan to update their Github repo every half year: https://forum.jingos.com/t/faq-about-jingos/243

Seems weird to me.

Makes sense, since they're downstream from Ubuntu, and this is Ubuntu's release cadence.

Well it did answer my question what this is written in. They use QT.