{"id":7710,"date":"2026-07-27T22:34:45","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T05:34:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/?p=7710"},"modified":"2026-07-27T22:34:45","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T05:34:45","slug":"openuk-wants-britain-to-stop-giving-away-open-source-creations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/?p=7710","title":{"rendered":"OpenUK Wants Britain to Stop Giving Away Open Source Creations"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"the<\/figure>\n

OpenUK recently published its AI Openness<\/a> report, and buried inside the 40-page document is a big ask from the UK government. Build Britain its own foundation that holds code, governance, and standards the way the Linux Foundation<\/a> (LF) does in the US.<\/p>\n

If you are hearing that name for the first time, OpenUK<\/a> is a UK-based (obviously<\/em>) non-profit that advocates for open technology and is led by Amanda Brock<\/a>. They first put out this call in a report<\/a> titled “Making the UK the Home of Open Source<\/em>,” which was submitted to UKRI<\/a> earlier this year.<\/p>\n

The AI Openness report restates the case with added urgency this time.<\/p>\n

The ask<\/h2>\n

Characterizing the proposed British flavor of LF as a National Foundation<\/em><\/strong>, the body, once formed, would hold repositories, standards, and datasets built with UK public money rather than watch that work migrate to servers and governance boards based elsewhere.<\/p>\n

It would also handle training, community engagement, and event organizing. Those are areas that would otherwise need separate infrastructure, like an open source program office<\/a> (OSPO) and a sovereign fund<\/a>.<\/p>\n

OpenUK frames this as a funding and governance gap<\/strong> more than a technology one.<\/p>\n

They note that the UK ranks as Europe’s top country in open source software and AI openness, yet it has no equivalent to the Linux Foundation, Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency<\/strong>, or China’s Open Atom Foundation<\/strong> to show for it.<\/p>\n

UK is bleeding open source<\/h2>\n

The non-profit didn’t have to look far to prove its point, as MCP<\/a> is the group’s strongest example.<\/p>\n

The Model Context Protocol<\/strong>, now the standard behind how AI models connect to outside tools and data, was created by two engineers in London. Anthropic backed the protocol<\/strong> and eventually donated it to LF’s Agentic AI Foundation<\/a>, alongside Block’s goose and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md<\/code> specification.<\/p>\n

In conversation with OpenUK, David Soria Parra<\/a>, one of MCP’s co-creators, said that they gave MCP away because they needed the standard to stay vendor neutral, free of trademark and licensing risk.<\/p>\n

If the UK had an established foundation, then they wouldn’t have lost MCP to the US.<\/em> \ud83d\ude43<\/p>\n

Not the only ones<\/h2>\n

The European Commission has already shown off an initiative<\/a> to break free from US tech dominance<\/strong> by moving towards an open European digital ecosystem. It would cover fields like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, open hardware, internet technologies, and industrial applications like automotive and manufacturing.<\/p>\n

Germany is closer to what OpenUK wants for the UK. Its Sovereign Tech Fund<\/a> has turned into a government agency, and the report calls that “the right direction<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

China has already proven the model works. Open source became a national pillar under its 14th Five-Year Plan<\/a>, supported by a dedicated foundation called the Open Atom Foundation<\/a>. <\/p>\n

DeepSeek\u2019s R1 showed how that focus pays off, leveraging open-weights and knowledge distillation to deliver frontier-level AI at a fraction of the cost.<\/p>\n

OpenUK looks to garner interest from various public sector organizations across the UK while also aiming to collaborate with global experts, delivering the best proposal for their country as a result.<\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OpenUK recently published its AI Openness report, and buried inside the 40-page document is a big ask from the UK government. Build Britain its own foundation that holds code, governance,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}