Silicon Valley’s vocal commitment to online collaboration is at odds with the walled gardens of its biggest companies. Open source software, a term coined in 1998, remains a popular idea. Artificial intelligence companies are the latest to preach its benefits. Do not be fooled: the tech sector will never embrace true openness.
Open source was a programmer-led movement that endorsed making source code available to the public to modify, build on and improve. Accessibility and transparency aid scientific breakthroughs. Free computer operating system Linux is the flagship product. But openness was behind the development of the internet itself.
AI has produced a new fight between open and proprietary tech. In March, Elon Musk sued ChatGPT creator OpenAI, claiming that what he had donated to as an open source organisation (hence the name) had become a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft. He noted Microsoft’s perpetual licence for much of OpenAI’s intellectual property.