The operating system running your web server. The framework behind your favourite app. The tools your bank uses to process transactions. Chances are, all of them rely on open source software — code that anyone can read, use, and improve.
The open source movement grew out of a simple frustration: proprietary software locked developers out of the tools they needed. Richard Stallman's GNU project in the 1980s and Linus Torvalds' Linux kernel in 1991 laid the foundation for a different model entirely — one built on sharing, collaboration, and collective ownership.
Open source is free as in freedom, not necessarily free as in price. Companies build billion-dollar businesses on open source foundations, contributing back to the projects that power them — or sometimes not, which remains a source of ongoing tension in the community.
Software is like sex: it's better when it's free. — Linus Torvalds
AI is the new frontier. Large language models trained on open data, open weights released for community fine-tuning, and open research pipelines are reshaping what open source means in an age of machine learning.
The question now isn't whether open source will survive — it's already won. The question is whether the communities that sustain it can keep pace with the scale of what's being built on top of them.