#open-source-software

#open-source-software

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross in a Wednesday letter to take steps to address vulnerabilities in open-source software projects that help power many systems used in U.S. military and civilian agencies. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said he remains concerned about instances of open-source tools that received contributions from foreign adversaries like China and Russia.

All programmers, from hobbyists to those working at Microsoft or Google, use open-source software, which is present in between 70% and 90% of the computer applications we use today. No one starts a project from scratch; instead, they turn to libraries like GitHub or GitLab to download packages of code already written, reviewed, and improved by the community. Developers spend an average of two-thirds of their time adapting open-source software to their needs, and they build their application on top of that.

Every C-suite executive I meet asks the same question: Why is our AI investment stuck in pilot purgatory? After surveying over 200 AI practitioners for our latest research, I have a sobering answer: Only 22% of organizations have moved beyond experimentation to strategic AI deployment. The rest are trapped in what I call the "messy middle"-burning resources on scattered pilots that never reach production scale.

Blender, for those who don't know, is an open-source 3D modeling and animation tool currently sitting near the tipy top of its category. It's used by world-class VFX studios all over the world and, as of 2020, had over 14 million downloads, a number that continues to grow year over year. It's an incredibly successful project and believe it or not you don't have to pay the low-price of $12.99 a month to get a subscription to it.

We live in an astonishing technology-based world, fueled by and dependent on software. That software provides our networks, our security, our financial transactions, our supply chain management, and, of course, the generative AI systems that are top of mind for just about everyone. But where does that digital infrastructure come from? Nearly all of it is based on free and open source software, what the industry calls FOSS.

Hello and welcome to Python Bytes, where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to your earbuds. This is episode 449, recorded September 15th, 2025. And I am Brian Okken. And I am Michael Kennedy. And of course, this episode, not of course, but this episode is sponsored by us. So please check out the stuff we offer you guys and everyone.

Ross Kukulinski, vice president of product management for Kong, said OpenMeter will enable Kong to embed the usage-based metering and billing capabilities into Kong Konnect, a platform for managing application programming interfaces (APIs), early next year. In the meantime, Kong will continue to make the OpenMeter software available both as open source software and via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application service that OpenMeter provides.

The AI agent Big Sleep, developed by DeepMind and Project Zero, reported its first vulnerabilities in popular open-source software, finding 20 flaws.

Open-source software is foundational to economies and societies, yet its maintenance is underfunded. The public sector must find better ways to support its upkeep.

Voxtral bridges the gap between high error open-source models and costly proprietary models, offering state-of-the-art accuracy and semantic understanding at competitive pricing.

To those who know, he led the digital world out from the imperial serfdom that had seemed its inexorable fate.