Speaking at the company’s Tech Tour in Arizona, Intel datacentre boss Kevork Kechichian told hacks and analysts that the chipmaker should be more strategic about what it gives away.

Kechichian said during his keynote: “We have probably the largest footprint on open source out there from an infrastructure standpoint. 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.”

Translated from corporate-speak, Chipzilla seems tired of watching rivals like AMD and Qualcomm nick its homework.

Kechichian later insisted the company wasn’t about to flounce out of the open source community.

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

He added that the firm merely wanted to “figure out how we can get more out of that versus everyone else using our investments.”

A company mouthpiece later tried to tidy things up, claiming: “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.”

This raises questions about how Chipzilla plans to stop competitors from taking advantage of its software work. Keeping some code closed is one option. Intel’s OneMKL math kernel libraries are a case in point. The top-level interfaces are open source, but the clever stuff underneath is locked away.

At one stage, Chipzilla even slipped in a platform check to detect rival CPUs and throttle performance by forcing code to run on the most basic routines, even when faster AVX2 instructions were supported.

Such tactics could spread to other projects, although doing so risks the open source community forking the code and rallying around versions that aren’t beholden to any one vendor.

The danger is that Intel might simply not have the bodies to maintain its open source efforts anyway. The company has axed tens of thousands of staff in the past year, leaving a trail of abandoned software in its wake.

Phoronix recently reported that a raft of Debian and Ubuntu packages used to drive Intel’s hardware accelerators have been orphaned, including tools for the QuickAssist and Data Streaming accelerators. Just a few months earlier, Linux driver teams suffered the same fate after the bean counters handed out redundancy notices.