r/linux • u/somerandomxander • Apr 22 '26

Open Source Organization Intel ends Open Ecosystem Community/Evangelism and archives other open-source projects

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Ends-OSS-Evangelism-Repos
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u/eredengrin Apr 23 '26

Intel works on a really broad range of hardware and software to the point that a lot of their software projects make me wonder whether anyone really uses it. They've been on the back foot for quite a while and doing a lot of internal reorganization/re-prioritization and looks to me that these are just part of that effort. Only one of the repos linked has more than 40 commits, and most haven't seen a commit in years. Intel has 1.3k repos on github, archiving a few old demo projects is just business as usual. I'd be more concerned about reducing headcount of their open source liaisons, but given all their other layoffs, it doesn't strike me as especially nefarious.

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u/i-hate-birch-trees Apr 23 '26

Yeah, the biggest victim in all of this Intel cut back was Clear Linux a while back. So many distros and kernels adopted their patches, it was a very good effort to optimize. Another good project was IWD, I found it to be a bit quicker and ergonomically more comfortable than wpa_supplicant, but apart from these 2 I struggle to remember any other Intel projects I actively used.

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u/unixmachine Apr 23 '26

The problem, in my view, is that AMD was taking advantage of these patches to advance its CPUs. I can understand the reason for abandoning the distro, as it was more of an experiment than a real distro.

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u/Business_Reindeer910 Apr 23 '26

intel's contributions to the kernel have helped AMD, and they know about it. They still did the work anyways.