Khronos Group, who oversee various open standards like Vulkan and OpenGL, have formally opened up a Brussels-based European entity. Seems like a good move, making things less US-centric has been happening a lot across the tech industry lately.
The new entity is Khronos AISBL, an international non-profit association headquartered in Brussels, Belgium operating directly under the governance of The Khronos Group Inc.
With this in place they said it will enable European organizations to include Khronos as a formal project partner in major EU-funded research and innovation programs such as Horizon Europe.
Statements from the press release sent to GamingOnLinux today:
“Khronos standards are already developed and adopted by organizations throughout Europe, but until now our ability to participate directly in EU-funded initiatives has been limited,” said Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos Group. “With a European legal entity in place, Khronos can now serve as a formal project partner in European innovation programs, bringing open standards expertise into consortia, giving project results a direct path to inform the evolution of interoperability standards, and strengthening European influence in global technology ecosystems.”
“The European technology ecosystem increasingly benefits from open standards to enable collaboration across industries, organizations, and national borders,” said Matthieu Worm, President of the Virtual Worlds Association, the private-sector partner in the EU’s Co-Programmed Partnership for Virtual Worlds. “Khronos establishing a European entity creates new opportunities for European consortia and research programs to engage directly with one of the world’s most influential open standards organizations, helping ensure that innovation developed in Europe can interoperate globally.”
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Europe increasingly treats open source and open standards as strategic infrastructure rather than merely a cheap foundation for proprietary products. A European legal presence also provides jurisdictional redundancy: GitHub has already had to restrict access under US sanctions, and the sanctions against the ICC showed how vulnerable even Europe-based institutions can be to US-controlled infrastructure. At the same time, while a War on Science is being waged across the pond, Europe offers access to Horizon Europe and a strong research and funding ecosystem around CERN, NLnet and the Sovereign Tech Agency.
Eclipse already moved its governance to Europe, Linux Foundation Europe followed, and now Khronos is establishing itself here too. Add it all up and the direction makes perfect sense.
Now let’s hope the EU also finally makes the Savings and Investments Union a reality, so the companies, talent and capital growing around these foundations have fewer financial reasons to leave Europe again.
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