Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition

Kevork Kechichian says x86 giant's contributions should benefit Intel first

Over the years, Intel has established itself as a paragon of the open source community, but that could soon change under the x86 giant's new leadership.  

Speaking to press and analysts at Intel's Tech Tour in Arizona last week, Kevork Kechichian, who now leads Intel's datacenter biz, believes it's time to rethink what Chipzilla contributes to the open source community.

"We have probably the largest footprint on open source out there from an infrastructure standpoint," he said during his opening keynote. "We need to find a balance where we use that as an advantage to Intel and not let everyone else take it and run with it."

In other words, the company needs to ensure that its competitors don't benefit more from Intel's open source contributions than it does.

Speaking with El Reg during a press event in Arizona last week, Kechichian emphasized that the company has no intention of abandoning the open source community.

"Our intention is never to leave open source," he said. "There are lots of people benefiting from the huge investment that Intel put in there."

"We're just going to figure out how we can get more out of that [Intel's open source contributions] versus everyone else using our investments," he added.

A spokesperson later added the following clarification: "Intel remains deeply committed to open source. We’re sharpening our focus on where and how we contribute — ensuring our efforts not only reinforce the communities we’ve supported for decades but also highlight the unique strengths of Intel."

Open source software has numerous advantages. Transparency means that anyone can inspect the codebase and, if bugs, optimizations, or security vulnerabilities are discovered, the community can take immediate action to report, enhance, or patch them.

This transparency also means that code initially optimized for a particular piece of hardware - Intel's Xeon platform, for example - can be adapted to work with hardware from rival chip vendors like AMD, Qualcomm, or others. 

This community-driven, cross compatibility can help push adoption as customers don't need to worry about whether their apps or services will misbehave when moving between platforms. 

At the same time, it means that, with a bit more effort, rival chipmakers can use Intel's contributions as a shortcut to developing their own highly optimized libraries, and this appears to be the crux of Kechichian's problem.

How Intel intends to prevent rivals from gaining an advantage from its software developments isn't entirely clear. However, the company could choose to keep some aspects of its code base closed.

Intel's OneMKL math kernel libraries are a prime example. While many of the higher level interfaces are open source, the low-level math libraries themselves are closed.

What's more, at least at one point, Intel implemented a check that would detect rival CPU platforms and force the libraries to run the most basic implementations even after AVX2 vector extensions had been implemented.

It's possible that Intel may choose to extend these protections to other projects. This would, however, come at the risk of greater fragmentation, where the existing codebase is forked and the broader open source community gravitates around a vendor-agnostic implementation.

And that could end up happening anyway if Intel can't allocate the resources necessary to maintain its existing contributions. The past year has seen Intel shed tens of thousands of workers. The resulting brain drain is hard to ignore.

Late last week, FOSS-friendly pub Phoronix reported that many of the Debian and Ubuntu packages required to harness the accelerators baked into the chipmaker's processors had been orphaned. Affected libraries included key libraries and frameworks required to harness popular features like Intel's QuickAssist and Data Streaming accelerators. Just about two months earlier, several Linux drivers suffered the same fate as their maintainers were handed pink slips. ®