We all depend on open source. We will defend it together
akrites.org
akrites.org
A lot of open source folks are going to be very skeptical, rightly so, of this group of players.
> ... to find, fix, and responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in critical open source software ...
How this is implemented is going to be key. Are they going to contribute through (a) existing channels, pull requests etc. or (b) are they going to fork the projects under the guise of 'security' or (c) offer bug bounties or (d) contribute financially?
Approach (a) brings the community along. (b) alienates the community, splits resources, and in the long term will likely cause many open-source projects to die. (c) has potential but timing and speed can be unfavorable for critical bugs, and doesn't mesh with 'responsible disclosure'. (d) can be ineffective for critical bugs unless paired with support for maintainers, which can be incredibly helpful for the opensource ecosystem.
People talk about contributing financially, but how and to what end? Most projects aren't set up to accept or utilise donations. That said, I would say we should be providing all OSS projects with significant access to AI in order to review their codebases and PRs and hopefully relieve some of the maintenance burden. I know there are some initiatives in this area already.
Linux Foundation is run by the said called corporates from the list. So is Rust Foundation. Linux in itself is safe cos Linus controls it. Not the rest of the projects LF controls.
There's bureaucracy of course but the mission is clear. Highly recommend working with them in any capacity.
It may be an industry body, but it runs multiple community conferences and projects which support Open Source. A notable example in this case being the OpenSSF https://openssf.org/
The LF is not perfect, but I would expect them to come from an OSS and community angle on this.
Sounds like Google has been very helpful and nice.
It seems weird to blame Google here, given that they didn’t manufacture the bugs: the bugs were already there, and they just found them. This is arguably the best thing for all parties: open source maintainers are still under no obligation to fix things, but downstreams can properly inform themselves about the risks they inherit by using any given project.
The alternative is a “don’t ask, don’t tell” system, which people generally agree doesn’t work well in other aspects of life.
I read this they would build the patches privately (or with maintainers if confidential) and then share amongst their supporters before public release.
That's a feature to them, not a bug. They want the software and don't want the community.
What would you propose otherwise?
You say this as if these players aren't members of "the open source folks". It's not an exclusive club.
In fact, it doesn't even seem difficult to simultaneously acknowledge and commend the valuable role they play, while also expressing concern over the influence they wield and how it might contrast with desires and goals of the wider community.
I won't pretend to speak to specific numbers, but a huge amount of work and maintenance is from these programmers, or funded via the corporate actors which employ these programmers. Those actors are either on this list, or don't have a problem with this list.
What remains are the handful of truly independent contributors, which are a minority in terms of LoC (though they often have an outsized impact), and the peanut gallery.
Open source wasn't always this way, it would be a different discussion 30 years ago when independents were the only guys in town, but it is now.
I have found (c) to be high noise, low signal. We're winding down our HackerOne program.
D: we do this in a couple ways. For PQCA, for instance, we use credits from AWS to get access to hardware to run proofs and CI on. PQCA also has a paid mentorship program.
For OWF, we do the same with AWS credits, as well as provide hosting for projects to run services on for testing.
For LFDT, we offer paid mentorships, have paid for Trail of Bits to do reviews, and run events. We had a maintainer summit in New York in January so our maintainers could meet for two days face-to-face. We fund large GitHub CI runners for projects as well.
I know it doesn't answer everything, but our team is only a few people and we really do work hard to help developers. What I'll call the devrel team for OWF/PQCA/LFDT is three FTE, one contractor, and our manager.
LFDT: https://www.lfdecentralizedtrust.org/
OWF: https://openwallet.foundation/
PQCA: https://pqca.org/
PQCA benchmarks, for instance: https://pq-code-package.github.io/mldsa-native/dev/bench/
I always advice aspiring open source enthusiasts to stay far, far away from the Linux Foundation. It has become a barrier to software freedom these days, rather than an enabler.
What worked is to remove the bounty and simply allow people to report bugs responsibly. This attracts the kind of altruistic volunteers who want more secure software for ideological rather than financial reasons. They still use AI but you won’t see slop.
This is, of course, ridiculous, and Dr. Ambergris is just an amalagam of Muammar al-Gaddafi and some 2nd rate wannabe strongmen not worth mentioning that I made up for fun.
> Byzantine
Not the connotations I would aim for, but after looking at the organisations involved it's probably apt.
I've worked for one of these companies and it was built on OSS and they contribute absolutely nothing back. They just take. And they've literally built a product of duct tape and band aids out of OSS that they charge a premium for.
What a joke. This week keeps getting more bizarre by the hour.
Total dumpster fire of a company. They acquired a company called Edgewise and it was so bad that after a number of P0 outages in customer networks they pulled it from the market. I was there less than 6 months after constantly arguing with leadership about how the product was not production worthy. They pulled it about 3 months after I left.
But while I was there I saw just horrid things within ZPA and ZIA (their core products at the time). And with that so many GPL violations, which seems to be the norm within the security market, anyway.
I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.
https://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html
> We realize that it is often seen as an economic advantage for one company to "own" a market - in the software industry, that means to control tightly a particular conduit such that all others must pay for its use. This is typically done by "owning" the protocols through which companies conduct business, at the expense of all those other companies. To the extent that the protocols of the World Wide Web remain "unowned" by a single company, the Web will remain a level playing field for companies large and small. Thus, "ownership" of the protocols must be prevented.
I prefer easy.
If you prefer difficult, more power to you.
Not every airport is a huge commercial building with hundreds of people (also, you wouldn’t visit one of those to parachute jump). Some are akin to cozy shacks without a lot of traffic where you’re in and out in no time.
Clearly you don’t feel that strongly about it. You know what would’ve been easier than making an account just to post that comment? Not doing that.
Have you also stopped working, paying your bills, showering, eating, interacting with other people? Not doing any of that is easier than doing it.
I’m here to remind the thousands of readers that they are not alone.
The vast majority (99%?) of us, absolutely do not give a shit about open source.
You made an account to “remind people” they have support in… Doing the easy thing… Which is doing nothing? I fail to see who needs that.
> The vast majority (99%?) of us, absolutely do not give a shit about open source.
Absolutely the wrong website to make that claim. That number is way off.
Defeatism says otherwise!
> Over the long run, humanity has a pretty good record, carried by the people who refuse to give up.
Unfortunately when the struggle is against other people, especially the incumbent powers-that-be (in this case the capitalist overlords), those that refuse to give up have to fight long and hard to get enough other properly in the fight, and victory requires something drastic like at very least mass protests perhaps up to civil war level.
Keep in mind I am not a coder/engineer, I’m just kind of a tourist in that world, so if I can do it it’s clearly very achievable for many people.
No reason to throw up your hands in defeat. We don’t need everyone to shift over everything. We just need to make sure there’s always space and demand for open source software to keep it alive.
I barely have to do it, but imho, this is how software should work and what running a computer should feel like.
> Keep in mind I am not a coder/engineer
How do you control and audit something you don’t understand? What specific steps are you taking?
Wouldn’t you say that’s way better than the status quo with windows/macOS?
I would say it’s irrelevant to the conversation. I wasn’t throwing shade or criticising your approach, I was making an honest question to understand your argument better. I have no interest in flame wars.
Fair.
> That initial question felt a bit leading
How would you have phrased it? I’m genuinely asking.
> and there’s a bit of a hostile tone coming through.
It’s been my experience that in online writing with strangers it’s best to assume good faith and not assume tone. Read things imagining the other person is smiling and in a good mood (exceptions for obvious trolls). Not that I can do that every time, mind you, we all have flaws, but it avoids a ton of needless misunderstandings and doesn’t escalate.
> Seems it’s unintentional though so not a big deal.
It was. Thank you for replying.
Anyway it’s all good. I hope you have a nice weekend.
Thank you again for replying. A nice weekend to you too!
Gnome and Systemd is a fine example of how fucked up this can get.
You can always find bad examples. The good news is there’s still lots of good ones out there right now. No point in being defeatist about it, just do what you can
Instead, millions of developers now gift corporations their work by releasing everything under MIT or Apache, and those corporations take from that treasure trove what they want and give back what they want, which is very often nothing.
Many die on the hill of "developing something required for free with permissive licenses for recognition which will help with their future endeavors", which is the same with other creative lines of work. As a result they are milked of their knowledge and forced to bear the burden of leading the project and handling the community while companies just use what's developed while quietly but strongly nudging the project's direction for their benefit.
If the developer gets rogue, the thing is forked and sometimes closed down with no downside to the company, but the community and the developer(s) are hung to dry, conveniently signaling other developers about what they might face if they disobey their overlords with iron fists in velvet gloves as a secondary effect.
Last but not the least, many people are very ill-informed about GPL and how it works. I experience this when we discuss this with peers.
This is why I only use copyleft (or non-commercial/share-alike) licenses on what I build/produce/put out.
They mostly do not.
They only demand that you offer the source code to anyone that asks for it if you also distribute any kind of executable (you may even charge to cover the costs of the distribution).
The AGPL expands this to SaaS's too to close that loophole.
Apologies for my poorly worded comment!
Occasionally, EA for example, a big corp will donate some money to. Apple has created PRS to add support for Vision Pro.
If Godot was GPL it would be useless for most commercial game devs.
GitHub could only exist because it was built on top of git, which is also GPL licensed. This is not the only example but should be the immediate one since nearly a vast majority of devs touch git on a daily basis.
Maybe stop listening to your legal team and actually think for a moment. GPL doesn't prevent commercialization, what it does is make sure everyone contributes to the same project equally. Shocker, corporations do not want to contribute to the common good they want to rat fuck it into submission for profit.
The Godot foundation picked MIT for a good reason. If your legal team says no GPL then no GPL. This has been standard practice for decades.
The changes you make to a game engine are almost never the important part of your game's IP.
I guess you could sell the game ready to play, and then upload its source code without needed assets somewhere else.
Most companies aren’t going to be ok with this.
I know when I write a project, I just MIT license it. If some of the code I wrote helps you get your job done, go for it.
I always advice aspiring open source enthusiasts to stay far, far away from the Linux Foundation. It has become a barrier to software freedom these days, rather than an enabler.
"Microsoft will contribute expertise, resources, and AI technologies to help responsibly identify and fix vulnerabilities"
As a reminder, Microsoft runs NPM and GitHub. Microsoft has access to the best AI models and massive data centers. Despite that, their own products are rapidly getting worse at security and their services are central hubs through which various exploits are propagated. They are not making things better, they are actively and rapidly making things worse.
--
For a great example of how Microsoft deals with security issues within their own Open-Source projects, I recommend reading this GitHub thread:
https://github.com/dotnet/efcore/issues/38257
EF core currently distributes a version of SQLite that has a severe vulnerability. The issue was discovered over a year ago. It was fixed by SQLite within one week. EF core didn't mark their driver as vulnerable until a user recently reported it, got bounced around and argued with developers. The current stable version of .NET core will only get a fix in roughly two months.
Calling CVE-2025-70873 a severe vulnerability is a bit overplaying it imo. The vulnerability requires that you allow an attacker to import an arbitrary ZIP file
I looked at the vulnerability in question by the way, CVE-2025-70873, and it really is not that severe unless you're allowing users to import arbitrary ZIP files
Many of the names on the list makes the initiative rather suspect. Companies who do a lot to undermine free and open-source software, who hide critical software behind their walls, preventing both its scrutiny and its adaptation and improvement, and two of the LLM giants - they'll "defend open source"? I don't know about that.
> Akrites gives critical infrastructure stakeholders a confidential, structured place to coordinate vulnerability discovery, remediation, and disclosure across the open source projects they depend on
So, a bunch of large corporations - some of who are known to be in bed with the US government - will share vulnerabilities among themselves, out of the public eye? Fishy.
All they're really missing is Oracle and Bambu Lab.
Just another opaque and exclusive subproject of the Linux Foundation.
It might not be the idealistic flavour of open source you prefer, but it's the flavour of open source that's actively in use in most tech companies, and that also forms the makeup of most corporate open source participation (e.g. also the top corporate Linux contributors).
Since a lot of places are close in proximity, companies sometimes run private fiber lines and such to let peers download updates without competing with the entire world lol.
Everyone's fighting the same fight. Sharing and collaborating are normal things.
Share it and hide from the public, you mean?
> Everyone's fighting the same fight
Companies really are not "fighting the same fight" as people, generally. And some of these ones are definitely not "fighting the same fight" as FOSS developers, or just people in general.
With my OpenBSD developer hat on, getting new hardware in the hands of developers is really important, many of us are hacking on 5-10 year old thinkpads that need replacing.
https://www.openbsd.org/want.html
The OpenBSD foundation is ~50% away from its fundraising goal for 2026!
Thank you very much, but I remember what Google is doing with Android this September (closing third party installs using .apk).
There goes all the credibility of this post
> participants will contribute engineering resources
If it works out as planned, we will see. Apart from this, I am not overwhelmed by the claim of this project. It favors centralization and corporate circles, exactly the opposite of what the hacker ethics promotes for good reasons.
> exactly the opposite of what the hacker ethics promotes for good reasons.
Yup. Seems kind of like those zombie plants in the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (the first remake; though the original is also great, but it was more about communism as threat, whereas the first remake added a bit of alien horror motifes).
You can complain about supply chain problems, or you can actually try to work on it. They're trying to work on it.
It may also turn into another source of pressure. Maybe they manage to sort out the real vulns, but then they come in as high priority to the maintainers.
Many maintainers are already exhausted from their normal work, sans AI noise. Even if they supply fixes, it still requires review.
In best case they could reduce noise but the work is still there. The industry needs to generally fund OS projects to give them the agency to handle it on their own. That's is likely best for quality. If there is still need to filter AI noise then they can add that, but not as a secret opaque thing that controls it all.
I dont know if this is a good thing or not. On paper it seems fine but there is something that feels wrong about it and I dont know exactly what.
I would disagree with this, it's the same amount of community effort as it's always been. Big projects have big governance, and receive lots of patches. Smaller projects receive fewer patches. The community generally happens in Discord or IRC or on mailing lists, but it definitely exists.
The real threat to "community effort" are drive-by low-effort LLM-generated Pull requests that decrease the signal-to-noise ratio by a lot and make managing open source projects such a slog
I'm not an open source maintainer so I could be completely off base here.
Accepting 'Big Changes' from people is VERY frustrating. These thoughts run through my head.
* Idea is usually good! Even if I don't understand it could help lots of others users.
* The contributor is very focused on just getting their feature in. The impact on the larger project isn't as much a concern.
* New contributors often don't have the grit to see it out. They will disappear before things are done. So I am left picking up the pieces (which is harder then doing it all myself)
----
What I try and remember is that their happiness/experience matters more then any code. I try to help the contributor learn/grow as much as possible and even see some career benefits out of it. Pion will cease to matter eventually, so I hope to help as many programmers with it as possible.
Open source would look drastically different, for the better I might add, if devs had a real choice in what to invest in.
Corporate control of open sources has not benefited devs or society as it stands. Continuing to let corporations control should not continue to stand. There is no reason why big tech can have taxes imposed on them where the public can decide what is best for them and not the devs at Meta that are fine with profiting from a genocide or mass misery.
I got a 2 weeks ban from python's discuss when I suggested that core developers who work on python as part of their day job could disclose who their employer is.
Probably not as impressive to a non-Greek, but to a Greek person it creates very strong imagery.
> The akritai (singular akrites) is a term used in the Byzantine Empire in the 9th–11th centuries to denote the frontier soldiers guarding the Empire's eastern border, facing the Muslim states of the Middle East. (Wikipedia)
Akron means edge or border, so "frontiersman" or "those of the border".
EDIT: Commenters seem upset about the Muslim part, I didn’t mean to imply anything, you cannot just copy-paste contemporary disputes and prejudices a thousand years ago. In the historical context it’s just like most borders between different civilizations. The point is that they were a collective organization getting together to defend their land.
if true, then choosing this name was a very bad decision.
Imagine how Muslims would feel, demonizing them even more, before they were terrorists, now they are attacking open source and hence some organizations need akrites to defend from them.
I really wish such organizations which try to demonize anyone, to fail miserably
But still, the name is a bad, uninformed choice.
It's not Muslim related even at the time they exists.
I mean I guess we have stop calling things the Great Wall because it repelled incursions from the Manchurians and maybe those people who live in their ancestral lands who were defeated and incorporated into modern Chinese society might feel a tinge of anger…
I wish malicious interpretations like yours would fail miserably. The word for the soldiers is about them, not who they fought.
So, in terms of a security project an Akritas would be you running an EDR agent on a machine that you own, not some of the signatory companies who basically do not own anything on the edge (end user equipment).
Remains to be seen whether history will repeat itself: when the tax breaks/ free AI use stops, will anyone keep doing this?
Disclaimer: I have had nothing to do with this initiative, and was not consulted on the name.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Carney%27s_Davos_speech
Ambitious and interesting. I wonder how long this will last and on whose dime and time? Akrites employs no engineers, so who will make the fixes and who'll pay them?
Besides many of the companies on the list are suspext numero uno for the state of open source
> Besides many of the companies on the list are suspext numero uno for the state of open source
On this I agree. This seems indeed just promo advertising to white-wash these companies. They don't really care about ethics in open source.
If it's sent to Akrites, they can even pretend it's done responsibly – even though only megacorps get a seat around that table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
There isn't a call out for contributors. This is all done behind closed doors. It's the antithesis of free/open source software, presented as defending it.
I don't particularly have any better ideas. And I'm not particularly criticising. It's just a lot of the time the terms are synonymous, but here they starkly different.
They terrorized them to abandon their free time. They terrorized them to find easy solutions in the workplace instead of coming up with solutions that require technical expertise and deep thinking. They terrorized people to not conform to standards, or create standards but instead patch around lack of standardization. They terrorized people to not question, but accept. To become slaves. They did not help them get wide knowledge but be specific on the work, like mass produced meat. They swept all problems under the carpet and said "This time it will be different". No victories, just silence on the defeats.
It has been happening in the past, has accelerated and made worse as they seized more power.
The leap to AI era is the latest and more violent step of this attack on fundamental human rights.
The problem is political in my opinion. People ought to demand a better life and more free time to work on open source or do their hobbies. They ought to demand human centric laws that stop the greed and by enforcing the laws at last.
Free time is not for consumption, but for production of higher intellectual artefacts.
Meanwhile the Germans were working overnight to manufacture bombs. That, alone, is already a sufficient explanation on why we got invaded and lost our country to one of the evilest powers of Earth. France had to be rescued by the Russian, the English and the Americans after losing millions of inhabitants. Because we literally took too much holidays.
The one who works the most reaps the entire benefits. And it’s clearly not good to ask for less work all the time. Today France is peanuts on the international market, we are second at everything. Who heard of DailyMotion, which was once as big as Youtube, or Mistral, which was supposed to be our OpenAI?
A charitable foundation might be plausible to help companies secure their closed for-profit software but it doesn’t really have the same urgency for the fabric of the internet (or the same moral clarity)
Yet still important to be secured due to the impact vulnerabilities can have. And LLMs can work without source code access via utilizing things like debug symbols, disassembly, reverse engineering, etc.
>paid maintainers
Just like open source maintainers their time is already being spent on other things which they see as more important over making the project 100% security bug free. Just because they are being paid, that doesn't make security their number 1 priority.
Still not addressed the moral clarity point being brought up, nor the ramifications of the Linux Foundation choosing which closed source projects to focus on and alienating their mission statement.
Again, your idea is noble but why should the Linux Foundation be saddled with it when those other options exist? OSS needs their focus as their mission outlines.
Well perhaps the companies who employ them to make that software they sell for profit should let them do that first rather than tokenmaxxing, and the great big non-profit effort can get round to them to help a little bit later after it has helped secure all the open-source stuff the internet actually runs on.
Closed software still has many people with access to the code. Governments or researchers have been given access to lots of critical source code. It can also be leaked. I wonder whether attackers are going to be more willing to bribe people with access to source now they have better odds of finding vulnerabilities with limited effort.
But in the examples cited (and really any other large closed piece of code of any significance in this era) it also has owners with money, and they should be compelled to fix their own stuff.
Or open the source code to be fixed, I guess ;-)
My entire technology stack was built on Microsoft's ecosystem, not on open source. This was Microsoft's attempt to expand their base for the corporate hiring market and OS market share.
Conversely, open source was a huge barrier for me. When I have a product I've built, I have to get past open source, but accessing open source comes with the barrier of English. And once you get past the English barrier, you hit the cultural barrier.
My hobby projects do integrate with open source, but all the technology that actually makes me money depends entirely on the Microsoft ecosystem. Most of the Asian developers around me are also tied to specific vendors. On the other hand, the Korean companies that do have a culture of contributing to open source are large corporations, and entry is determined by academic pedigree.
Because the entire context of open source is in English, and learning English reliably is expensive in itself. So to properly work as a developer in Korea, you actually need to be vendor dependent. The corporate ecosystem is not oppression; it is the only viable path to education and survival. If you want to grasp the latest trends, you ultimately need curation from a specific company. Some people say Hangul is a great writing system, but to me, this is where it becomes a curse and a shackle.
So when I read Hacker News, I feel just how large the gap in thinking is between the West and the East. The Japanese developers I have talked to mostly talk about coding within corporate environments rather than open source, and Chinese developers are also shaped by their corporate environments. But the posts on HN talk about their 'gardens' being ruined and absorbed by corporations, and they resist that. But since I was raised in a corporate environment from the start, I cannot imagine a different one, so this resistance tends to feel like an aristocratic hobby to me.
On the flip side, HN might see corporations as predators. Technology should be a commons, and developers should be free, not tenant farmers of a platform.
But the irony I personally feel is that to protect this 'garden commons,' they end up creating centralized, non-public coordination mechanisms with the very corporations that plunder the commons. That feels contradictory to me.
For security vulnerability response, non-public coordination may be necessary. If a vulnerability is disclosed before a patch is ready, attackers can create exploits. But the principle of open source is transparency and open discussion, while the Akrites-style security principle is non-public coordination and a single point of contact.
On top of that, corporations used open source as free infrastructure, and now that the risk has grown, they are building corporate-led governance systems based on that risk. That feels ambiguous to me. Of course, open source sponsorship has always had some tension, but if that was buying a craftsman's work, this looks more like buying the craftsman's workshop.
I wonder how Westerners would read this. I am curious. To me, this looks like a political struggle to take control of governance over the commons. Do Westerners see it as the Avengers? The difference in mindset is sometimes painful.
The language barrier is interesting, there is more Chinese open source now too, but yes so much is English. I remember using google translate for Nginx from Russian back in the day, and openresty from Chinese, but yes we are lucky,
It really makes me realize just how different cultures and values can be.
Sometimes I feel like I want to be as free as you all are, but I also recognize that my own biases are deeply ingrained. There's a line in Demian that goes, 'The bird fights its way out of the egg.' It makes me strongly feel just how narrow my world really is
If you ask american/european/english-speaking developers about coding, it will mostly be about/in the context of corporate environments rather than open source too! The majority do not actively or primarily contribute to open source projects, but instead corporate environments as well.
In an alternative timeline where the lingua franca isn't english, I can still see open source culture exist; I don't think the desire to publish and cooperate in public is an inherently "western" culture. It will also run into the same conflict of interest between Open-Source and Corporate: one prefers transparency and full-disclosure, the other prefers control in the interest of minimizing risk.
For example, object-oriented programming or conditional statements generally follow a What -> Action -> Target order. But my native grammar follows a What -> Target -> Action order. So I have to translate SOV logic into SVO code syntax.
The reality is that English speakers are numerous, Japanese and Korean speakers are relatively few, and while Chinese speakers are quite numerous, there's still some cognitive load due to differences in thought patterns. It's almost like a difference in the sheer volume of accessible knowledge.
Due to the cumulative cost of translation, this feels like a bigger hurdle than people realize.
So sometimes language gives a sense of identity tied to 'ethnicity' and 'nation,' but when it comes to the competition for knowledge, I feel that the number of native speakers matters more. There are points where I agree with you, and points where I don't. It's complicated
Putting my nostalgia-tinted glasses on, it's sad how far we've strayed from that.
If the language barrier disappeared overnight, would the situation still be the same, do you think? What would an Eastern open source movement look like, and why hasn't one developed?
But regarding Korea and China: in China, there's Gitee, which has a very robust open source environment, but it's not really 'Western style open source' it's more like corporate projects being made publicly available for free. In other words, companies release assignments and people gather to work on them. That's the dominant model. (And that becomes part of their employment portfolio. So it feels very much like an incubation system for corporate projects.)
For Korea, I think it's largely because the absolute number of Korean speakers is smaller than English speakers. As a result, Korea's tech infrastructure generally lags behind the English speaking world. It feels like: English trends emerge -> a few years later, once they stabilize, Korea starts adopting them!
The usual pattern here is that the people curating these English trends for Korea are Koreans who have worked at FAANG-like companies and come back, so they have a strong influence. But I don't necessarily agree with their perspectives, which is why I came here to see what the raw data from the West actually looks like.
On top of that, Korea's IT projects are mostly government-led (because the domestic market isn't that large), so the government essentially acts as a VC. And within this government-led incubation system, only the final winner takes everything. Given that kind of environment, I wonder if that's why open source doesn't really take off.
The corporations themselves are not a monolith. Their leadership and engineering teams are made up of diverse perspectives on open source, and those perspectives can shift. These same questions are debated within the company and the balance is always shifting in a way that can either benefit or undermine open source. I'm personally skeptical for some of the reasons you described, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a better relationship to open source.
Open source movement has been a massive success in devaluing skilled workers to except peanuts while American corporations suck up as much value as possible while giving less than half a percent in return.
There needs to be a backlash against this corporate white washing.
I think they are predicting that free-software projects are in freefall and no longer attract good people.
I recall reading a Linus Torvalds interview in which he said that Git's killer feature was its current maintainer.
It sounds like a realization that you can only leech off the host so much, and once your host is dead, there is nobody else to leech from.
So things do get fixed, but it is not due to their graciousness.
> We are joined by Amazon Web Services…
Does that include anything more than soundbites? This effort is likely to require organizational support, and funding.
It’s not clear to me, that the organizations supplying the quotes, are “undersigned.” Not all of the quotes make it clear that the organization is doing anything more than asking an LLM to generate some text.
Used them first to train LLMs to earn money, then exploit them again?
Yeah, nah, I'm good. That's not "open-source."
Or maybe it is, but it's not "Free Software," the better thing.
“Maintainers of last resort”, my [back].
But then there is the very long tail of small open source projects, maintained by a single developer in their spare time, which collectively support the entire software ecosystem. And in every one of these announcements, there's rarely anything being done for this group.
Changing this wouldn't be difficult. AI based vulnerability scanning of projects could be opt-in, where reports are only sent to the security contact listed in the project. This would avoid the risk of malicious actors scanning open source projects with the tool, and avoid sending reports to those projects that don't want them, while supporting the OSS software that doesn't make the "critical" threshold in LFs current criteria.
Unfortunately that would also mean spending LF member funds on projects that may not directly benefit those LF members, so I'm not holding my breath.
This is pure corporate slop feels good bullshit generated by an LLM. “critical” comes from “kritikós” which means “related to judgement”. “Akritai” comes from “akron/ἄκρον” which means border.
To be fair the article doesn’t sit well with me on its own, but making crappy, etymologically-untrue claim? Not on my watch.
> Amazon Web Services
We really don't give a shit, We will continue to not give a shit. We might give you a credit if threatened by the EU but really? We don't give a shit. Keep sending us that sweet dosh for AWS.
> Anthropic
We underpin the front page of the internet with Ai and in so we allow it to train upon the collective with no recognition. It's great to take and not give back. By the way your vibe coded app is looking ownage.
> Cisco
We are Cisco and we'll license you if we could. We invented the subscription model to charge you per Ethernet port on your router. Opensource is great, we don't even have to contribute upstream. We did once upon a time, isn't that enough?
> Citi
In partnership with Linux Foundation, we will do nothing and keep doing nothing. Linus enjoys his dosh and handjob now and then.
> CNCF
Working on the right fixes before the window closes, we prefer that to be left to the developers and we are very proud to support that effort. Unfortunately, no treats for the developers is written in to our company policy. How does pizza sound?
> RedHat
Open source is the foundation of modern software innovation so we hide answers behind a paywall. We sold ourselves to IBM so we could keep lubing that stripper pole to fill our filthy pockets. Larry Ellison will be here soon for his next lap-dance.
> Microsoft & GitHub
We decided to throw legal action at a security analyst for finding exploits in our OS for laughs. Open source all the way, we don't even allow you to search on GitHub without a rate limit; it's healthy to laugh. How's your mother doing? She seems a keen user of Windows 11 and as she is very important to us, we've removed that feature she uses most.