Why Open Source Can’t Innovate

How The Commons Was Closed for the Benefit of the Few

When the Web was young, open source helped lead innovation.

Individual programmers and small companies joined together, under a shared contract, to build things no one of them was able (or willing) to build alone. The Cloud owes its existence to projects like Hadoop, to companies like Red Hat, and to programs like mySQL.

Open source can’t do that anymore.

The turning point was Oracle’s purchase of Sun, which led to its closing the source on mySQL, as well as Solaris and Java. Projects could be forked, but Oracle’s lawyers stood by to stamp out innovation. The final decision in Google vs. Oracle  didn’t touch directly on this. But the result was to approve of it.

You can still start an open source project. But any corporate sponsor now has the power to close that source code, in whole or in part, at its whim. Foundations only take on existing projects. They don’t start them. They take the work of others and build on it. You can compete with another project, you can fork the code, but you’re starting all over again, now with a scaled competitor.

Greed

There’s a second reason why open source has floundered in the AI era.

That’s the sheer value to be gained from innovation.

OpenAI began as an open source project. They closed it, not just when they saw how much had to be invested, but when they saw how much money and power there was to be gained from it.

The greed of men like Sam Altman and Larry Ellison has wrecked the open source ethos. But it has also done more. It has destroyed the “halo effect” technology innovation once enjoyed among ordinary people. Now that programmers see open source as a grift (rather than a gift) and consumers see it as a power grab, entrepreneurs are on the defensive.

They deserve to be. They’ve been warned.

What has changed about technology in the last generation is that the “we” of shared innovation became the “me” of money and power. The fall of open source is a prime example, and those who reaped this whirlwind will inherit the wind.

Technology can’t advance rapidly without the active support of those who use it.