







Despite some outliers, “open source” did not meaningfully exist as a concept before 1998.
Open Source is Broken
The Open Source movement, as championed by the OSI, prizes absolute openness above all other concerns...

Open Source is Broken
The Open Source movement, as championed by the OSI, prizes absolute openness above all other concerns. Openness, they claim, is an absolute good, from which all other virtues flow, not to be questioned or criticized. It doesn’t matter if that openness enables evil in the world, without openness we

Open Source Explained — Open Indie
Musings on the concept of ‘open source’, in the broadest possible definition of the term. Also an invitation to become a participant in ...

Reframing “Open Source AI” with Meredith Whittaker: AI Impact Summit 2026
Open source is the electric vehicle of digital policy
Open source is very popular these days, not least due to the open-source strategy that the European Commission announced last week as part of the tech sovereignty package. While there is a lot to criticise about that strategy (exaggerated goals, misleading numbers etc), the one thing I would like to

Why Open Source Failed. (If you like this essay, you may be… | by Joh…
archived 21 Apr 2023 23:58:23 UTC

Open source is a restaurant
[[Chad Whitacre]] makes a great analogy around when/how software gets paid for, vs food. Open Source is a restaurant. At a restaurant, you eat your meal fir...

From OSS to Open Source AI: an Exploratory Study of Collaborative...
AI development is embracing open-source paradigm, but the fundamental distinction between AI models and traditional software artifacts may lead to a divergent open-source development paradigm with...

Anthony Fu
It’s not a secret that open-source projects are now a critical part of almost every software project. While most open-source projects are maintained by volunteers, the sustainability of these projects becomes a big concern. The recent xz/liblzma vulnerability accident is a great example that shows the importance of open-source projects and how severe the problem could be.
About | Open Source Ecology
The mission of Open Source Ecology (OSE) is to create the open source economy. An open source, libre economy is an efficient economy which increases innovation by open collaboration. To get there, OSE is currently developing a set of open source blueprints for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – a set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist – everything from a tractor, to an oven, to a circuit maker.

Emelia (@thisismissem.social)
It's pretty funny how everyone has seemingly forgotten why W Social went closed source: initially they were open source, and various people from the community looked through their fork of the bluesky codebases, and went "lol wat no".
Some startups are going ‘fair source’ to avoid the pitfalls of open source licensing | TechCrunch
New alternative category to 'closed source' could help companies monetize software in the open -- without going all-in on open source.

The Arguments Against Open Source AI are Very Bad | Tom Bedor's Blog
The release of Kimi K3 has opened a fresh round of angst and confused discourse. There's a loud cohort of journalists, business leaders, and politicians arguing that open source AI is a dangerous threat. OpenAI's Dean Ball:


The Missing Middle of Open Source
Why serious, maintainer-driven projects struggle to sustain themselves—and what it will take to fix it.

I can see a whole lot of people agreeing with this. Kinda the same with open source in general, but few open source projects are social protocols seeking widespread adoption. It's a particular flavor of narrative disconnection from reality we have to bridge out of to get out of our own way.
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Every @proto developer sounds like this to me: