Intel rethinks its open source strategy
Plus: A Ray of light at Linux Foundation, milestones for maintainer funding, and more
Hi folks,
Intel’s open-source rethink leads this week — a reminder that even the biggest upstream contributors are redrawing the line between collaboration and competition. Meanwhile, PyTorch has picked up Ray to bulk out its AI stack, and the movement to actually pay maintainers is starting to look less like charity and more like structure.
And, yes — someone’s built a $150 open-source VR headset, because of course they have.
Plus more…
As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.
Paul
Open issue
Intel redraws its open source lines
Intel has signaled a new era for its open source strategy — and it’s a colder one.
Speaking at the company’s Tech Tour in Arizona this month, Kevork Kechichian — executive vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group — said Intel will scale back contributions, arguing that the company has “probably the largest footprint on open source out there from an infrastructure standpoint,” and that it needs to “use that as an advantage… not let everyone else take it and run with it.”
While insisting Intel is “not abandoning open source,” the move marks a shift from years of community investment — think Clear Linux, OneAPI, and extensive kernel work — toward a model more tightly aligned with Intel’s commercial interests.
“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,” Kechichian explained to The Register.
For developers and partners who have long depended on Intel’s upstream code, the recalibration underscores a broader change in how large vendors weigh openness against competition, though often those shifts take the form of license changes or access restrictions. In Intel’s case, it’s not about closing projects but tightening where and why it contributes in the first place.
Read more: The Register
Patch notes
A Ray of light at the Linux Foundation
The PyTorch Foundation has added Ray — the open source distributed computing framework from Anyscale — to help build a unified AI compute stack spanning training and orchestration.
Read more: The Linux Foundation
Big Tech wires up ESUN
Meta, Nvidia, AMD, and OpenAI — working through the Open Compute Project Foundation — have launched the Ethernet for Scale-Up Networking (ESUN) standard, pitched as an open rival to InfiniBand for AI data centers.
Read more: Tech Radar
Milestones for maintainer money
Two notable milestones to report from the open source funding realm: FLOSS/Fund closed out 2025 with a second tranche of $675,000 in grants, bringing its total for the year to $1 million distributed across community projects. Meanwhile, Open Source Pledge reported $2.6 million paid out to maintainers in its first year — with 96 percent of launch members renewing.
Read more: Floss/Fund & Open Source Pledge on X
Probabl pulls in €13M for open forecasting
Paris-based Probabl, a startup spun out of France’s national research institute Inria and founded by maintainers of open source machine learning library scikit-learn, raised €13 million to advance open forecasting tools for data science teams.
Read more: TFN
Reflection raises $2B for open-frontier AI
Reflection, a US-based AI lab, landed $2 billion at a $8 billion valuation to build an open-source-leaning challenger to DeepSeek.
Read more: TechCrunch
LangChain lands big bucks
LangChain, the open source framework for building agentic and retrieval-augmented apps, raised $125 million at a $1.25 billion valuation to scale its enterprise tooling.
Read more: LangChain blog
Sigstore data goes public
The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) has released a research dataset from Sigstore’s transparency logs, giving academics and security teams open access to software-supply-chain signature data.
Read more: OpenSSF blog
And finally…
The $150 DIY VR headset
A maker known as CNCDan on YouTube has designed a VR headset aimed at sim racers, assembled from 3D-printed parts, off-the-shelf displays, and freely available firmware. The rig costs about $150 in components — roughly half the price of an entry level Meta Quest 3, with infinitely more hassle.
Still, it’s open to the bone: everything is on GitHub, under CERN-OHL-S-2.0 license, a strongly reciprocal open-hardware license that requires any derivatives to remain open.
It’s perhaps less plug-and-play than it is plug-and-pray, but it’s also a reminder that virtual reality doesn’t have to be proprietary.
Read more: ExtremeTech