There Was Never Such a Thing as ‘Open’ AI
At the turn of the century, when the modern web was just emerging and Microsoft was king, a small but growing technology movement posed an existential threat to the company. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO at the time, called one of its core elements “a cancer that attaches itself” to “everything it touches.” The disease was a competing operating system, Linux, and the open-source software it represented: programs that were free for anyone to download, modify, and use, in contrast to expensive, proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows and Office.
Open-source software did eventually attach itself to much of the internet—Mozilla , the operating system, and are all “open” projects—but the tech industry managed to turn the egalitarian philosophy into a business opportunity. Trillion-dollar companies use free open-source software to build or enhance their own products. And open-source anything is still frequently designed for, and on, the Big Tech platforms, gadgets, and data servers that mediate most internet access—in turn to the world’s most powerful firms. Just running an application or
