A hallmark of today’s AI Bubble is that proprietary solutions are leaving open source in the dust.
The arc of OpenAI, from an open source foundation to a profit-hungry business, is often used to illustrate the point. The investment required to build AI models, and the potential profits, have kept open source out of the game. The closest LLM to open source is Meta’s LLaMA, and as I’ve been saying repeatedly, it’s not open source at all.
True open source solutions like Kwaai seem to me nascent, naïve, even a bit hopeless. But this is the nature of open source. It follows from the heart, rather than leading from the head. It’s a response to market forces by those left behind. Unix had been around for 25 years before Linus Torvalds wrote his first Linux.
The Cloud era was built on open source because the dot-com crash let open source catch up, cutting costs by sharing tools. That’s going to happen this time. The dot-com era itself was characterized by theological disputes between advocates Free and Open Source (FOSS), represented by Richard Stallman and the GPL, and what we now call open source, represented by Eric Raymond and his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Most projects wound up using FOSS’ GPL as their licensing structure, while giving their loyalty to Raymond.
Open Source Theology
The arguments of the 1990s are still around.
Open source attracts help, but at the expense of profit. People often switch sides once they see value in what others did that they want to capture.
The problem is that the law supports theft. The Supreme Court’s decision in Google vs. Oracle accepted Oracle’s contention that it could make open source closed on its say-so. That means a corporate promise of open source is a pie crust promise. Even if Meta said tomorrow that it was placing LLaMa under an open source license, it could withdraw that license the next day, just as Oracle closed off Solaris, mySQL, and Java.
The only assurance developers have that the code they’re using will remain under the license they hold it under is if that license is held by a non-profit foundation, like the Linux Foundation, Apache, or Eclipse. They offer legal protection because the big players within those groups police one another. There’s a balance of power.
Apache lists dozens of projects among its hundreds with a tinge of AI on them. Just as AI has become an Internet buzzword corporations slap on whatever is in the shop, so it is with open source projects. While Google claims LLaMa is the largest open source AI, friend of the blog Jason Perlow lists dozens of smaller, open source projects you can use today.
The Linux Foundation also launched an open source platform in August. Unfortunately, it was sponsored by Intel, now headed for the scrap heap. Linux has dozens of projects under its wing, but these are point solutions. There’s no grand vision, yet. Just a lot of graphs.
Like everything else, computing follows the Golden Rule, in that he who has the gold makes the rules. Until the AI Bubble pops, open source will remain a collection of small mammals in a world of dinosaurs. But make no mistake, that bubble will pop. Programmers around the world are waiting on that day with hope, as investors wait for it with fear.
