Zoe Kooyman is now running the Free Software Foundation. People I know and trust say she’s a good choice.
She had better be. She’s walking into a Category 5 hurricane.
The problem starts with DeepSeek. The Chinese LLM is available as open source under the MIT License. That’s different from the GPL, but Kooyman made clear the FSF is now aligned with the mainstream free software movement.
The issue is freedom. To review, FSF defines four freedoms. Freedom to download software, freedom to use it, freedom to change it, and freedom to share the changes. The GPL that the FSF wrote is different than other open source licenses, which define this fourth freedom as the freedom to profit from your improvements.
In practice, freedom is freedom, Kooyman is for freedom, and DeepSeek can be downloaded free. But when ChatGPT’s Sam Altman talked about policy recently, he insisted that while he favors a “light” approach to AI regulation he wants Chinese software banned on national security grounds.
As first mover in AI, ChatGPT still has a stranglehold on the market, almost 60% of the Generative AI market and 70% of subscription sales last year. Altman is close to the Administration. His voice will be heard.
This means we could be entering a time when open source software is banned, and American users are forced to buy proprietary tools by their government. At the very least, rhetoric around open source is about to get hot, political, even geopolitical.
How This Goes Down
I don’t think there’s any chance that the U.S. government can effectively ban open source software, no matter its origin. Since it’s open source, any problematic code can be stripped out. If necessary it can be forked.
I’m just as concerned with what this means more generally. China, which kept its market closed, proprietary, and under the thumb of an oppressive government for years, is now on the side of software freedom. The U.S. is against it.
The conflict is not going to go America’s way. I suspect we’re going to quickly lose international markets to open source, just as we’re going to lose them to tariffs. While America has the world’s dominant military, and the biggest economy, it can’t win an economic war against the whole world, and that’s what we’re walking into.
Open source is going to win. Zoe Kooyman is going to be vindicated. But open source is also going to be vilified, by American proprietary companies with an incentive to do so, and maybe by the Administration. Maybe Nvidia, which supports open source, and maybe Meta, which claims to, will stand by Kooyman. On the other hand, this is a political struggle. Maybe they won’t.
I’ve said open source will win AI before, in fact more than once. I just didn’t say it would be easy, and I didn’t anticipate Americans would become baddies in the process.
Like I said, cat 5 hurricane.
