"Sometimes in tech we misunderstand our history. For example, because Linux eventually commoditized the Unix wars, and because Apache and Kubernetes became the standard plumbing of the web, we assume that "openness" is an inevitable force of nature. The narrative is comforting; it's also mostly wrong. At least, it's not completely correct in the ways advocates sometimes suppose. When open source wins, it's not because it's morally superior or because "many eyes make all bugs shallow" (Linus's Law). It dominates when a technology becomes infrastructure that everyone needs but no one wants to compete on."
"Look at the server operating system market. Linux won because the operating system became a commodity. There was no competitive advantage in building a better proprietary kernel than your neighbor; the value moved up the stack to the applications. So, companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon poured resources into Linux, effectively sharing the maintenance cost of the boring stuff so they could compete on the interesting stuff where data and scale matter most (search, social graphs, cloud services)."
Open source tends to dominate when a technology becomes commoditized infrastructure that no one wants to compete on. The operating system example shows Linux winning because the OS became a commodity and competitive advantage shifted up the stack to applications. Large companies invested in and shared maintenance of that foundational layer to focus on services driven by data and scale. In AI, open weights and models provide an essential foundation, but commercial value accrues to proprietary guardrails, specialized agents, and exclusive datasets. The AI economy reflects an ongoing interplay between open foundational models and closed, differentiated layers built on top.
Read at InfoWorld
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]