In the past three days, Intel has archived a total of 161 of its open source projects on GitHub. All affected projects have received consistent readme file changes. It states in each case that Intel has “ceased development and contributions to this project, including but not limited to maintenance, bug fixes, new versions or updates.”
Among the most popular of the affected open source projects include the one originally developed for Stephen Hawking Tool Acat (Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit)which supports people with neurological disabilities in using computers and the Library Fast UI Draw, a GPU-optimized canvas interface. Yesterday, iX reported on the end of the hypervisor HAXM, which is popular among Android developers.
With the large number of project ends, it is now finally clear that the security gaps announced in the commit to the end of HAXM are not the sole reason for the development stop. Another update now reveals that Intel HAXM with the support of Intel virtualization technology is superfluous both on Windows systems via Microsoft Hyper-V and on macOS with HVF.
However, Intel continues to remain silent about the reasons for the other, far-reaching project terminations. In addition, the respective changes to the readme text only say that those who “still depend on the project, are interested in developing it further independently or in maintaining patches for the open source community” may create their own project fork.
(jvo)
