Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger reaffirmed the chipmaker’s commitment to building an open ecosystem of technologies in a LinkedIn post Tuesday.

“Innovation thrives in an open, democratized environment where people can connect, communicate, and respond together to new stimuli,” he wrote. “Now more than ever, the challenges of the world demand innovation. They demand transparency. They are solved in the open.”

According to Gelsinger, many of the technologies we take for granted today — personal computing, the internet, and the networks that connect society — wouldn’t have been possible were it not for open collaboration, often between rivals.

“Today’s technologists stand on the shoulders of those who came before us,” he said.

This open collaboration has tremendous potential when carefully aimed, Gelsinger said, evoking the efforts of the high-performance computing community to map COVID-19 at the molecular and atomic levels in the early days of the pandemic.

Intel is no stranger to open standards. The company had its hands in everything from universal serial bus (USB), WiFi, Bluetooth, and most recently compute express link (CXL), to name just a few.

And Gelsinger intends to continue this tradition. He pledged to double down on the company’s “deep legacy in open platforms,” which he said was key to driving innovation.

Intel will also invest in open software stacks like oneAPI, and empower collaboration among developers, academia, and the broader ecosystem to further research in areas like neuromorphic and quantum computing. And as Intel pursues this mission, Gelsinger promised the chipmaker would do so in a way that is “inclusive in our approach and support of communities’ efforts, while embracing diversity and our differences, because they make us better.”

“We must make an open ecosystem experience compelling, easy, secure, and better,” he added.

That’s what Gelsinger set out to do in 1997 with the Intel Developer Forum, and what he hopes to achieve again at this week’s Intel Innovation event. Open standards are one of several topics Gelsinger is expected to cover in his keynote speech tomorrow.

According to Glenn O'Donnell, VP and research director of infrastructure and operations at Forrester Research, open initiatives have the potential to change the world.

“I applaud Gelsinger's enhanced efforts to energize open development ecosystems,” he said, explaining that while Intel has kept a tight grip on the x86 architecture, “There is much more to the Intel family than just x86 and a lot more to its ambitions to build around open platforms.”

And while different from the efforts of the open source software community, it bears the same spirit, O'Donnell added.