OpenUK Wants Britain to Stop Giving Away Open Source Creations

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, and standards the way the Linux Foundation (LF) does in the US.

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

The AI Openness report restates the case with added urgency this time.

The ask

Characterizing the proposed British flavor of LF as a National Foundation, 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.

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 (OSPO) and a sovereign fund.

OpenUK frames this as a funding and governance gap more than a technology one.

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, or China's Open Atom Foundation to show for it.

UK is bleeding open source

The non-profit didn't have to look far to prove its point, as MCP is the group's strongest example.

The Model Context Protocol, now the standard behind how AI models connect to outside tools and data, was created by two engineers in London. Anthropic backed the protocol and eventually donated it to LF's Agentic AI Foundation, alongside Block's goose and OpenAI's AGENTS.md specification.

In conversation with OpenUK, David Soria Parra, 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.

If the UK had an established foundation, then they wouldn't have lost MCP to the US. 🙃

Not the only ones

The European Commission has already shown off an initiative to break free from US tech dominance 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.

Germany is closer to what OpenUK wants for the UK. Its Sovereign Tech Fund has turned into a government agency, and the report calls that "the right direction."

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

DeepSeek’s R1 showed how that focus pays off, leveraging open-weights and knowledge distillation to deliver frontier-level AI at a fraction of the cost.

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.