Happy Birthday, AOSC (for the fifth time)!

Can't believe it's already been half a decade (and I have grown so old from who I was when AOSC has just got started in 2011). But nevertheless, happy birthday, AOSC! And I am so proud of you - not for you being the biggest or the best community, but the most honest and progressive of all communities!

I remember when I said that we shall bring creativity to China - for China only - and bring technology advancement to high school students... And of course, I also remember that I had once said to all my earliest friends and collegues that we shall leave the community when we finish high school, and let the new generation bring in new ideas and achievements...

But as here I stand today, the community means so much for me, and for all those contributed along the way to simply leave the community alone (and to be honest, we are still very small, way smaller than we had anticipated... "way back when"). Projects and ideas still piles up from within the community, and our most important project in the community, AOSC OS, have just released its first feature update to the fourth generation Core.

It is truly incredible when looking back half a decade ago, to see the past, naive selves. The challenges and criticism we faced in the years have only made us a better community, with more and more mature thoughts and methodologies. Back in 2011 when AOSC OS was still a custom release of OpenSUSE made in the SUSE Studio - who would have thought that we could one day become a full-fledged independent Linux Distribution with six (and the 7th coming) architectural ports? And back when we were attacked for being a bunch of crybabies, who would have thought that we could be one of the strongest Chinese Simplified/Traditional localization workforce for great open source projects like GNOME, Wine, and FreeDesktop.org? And back when we still were afraid to show our work to others in the field, who would have thought that we could deliver patches, bug reports, and suggestions to upstream projects in great quantities?

I do realize that we are still largely an unestablished community when compared to virtually anything else, with less than 20 people active for development. But today, in AOSC's birthday, it will only do justice to our beloved community to continue our optimistic moods, and to hang onto our work ethics - to never question what we could achieve, and only to question if we have done the best for our projects.

Looking ahead, there are still lots of great ideas yet to be implemented, like a more integrated collaboration infrastructure for our developers, and new ports and improvements to our AOSC OS. There will be more challenges ahead, and even questions to our own ways - but fear not, we are known to be a... well, good crowd of people to say the least - to make the possible from unlikelihood. We have always did, and we always will.

My dear friends and collegues, as the founder of this community, please accept my most sincere gratitude. This community could never have been what it is today without you, nor could I struggle alone.

— Mingcong Bai

A big thank you to Tianhao (James) Chai for creating the banner for our 5th anniversary in Minecraft (and on AOSC OS too)!

And here is a map for this "monument".