[ENGLISH] The open-source scene has undergone an incredible transformation in recent years. Since its inception in the 1970s and the rise of Linux, OSS has always been perceived externally as a project centred on freedom, anarchy and the idea of ‘making the world a better place’. It was therefore always met with derision, as the actual revolution – the structural change – went unrecognised. Nor, of course, is this picture entirely accurate: OSS has been used commercially from the very beginning. IBM was one of the movement’s biggest supporters. The entire (commercial) internet is based on OSS; Microsoft is the Linux Foundation’s largest donor, and so on and so forth.
Since the rise of open-source, open-weight AI models from China, even the tech bros from Stanford and Cambridge, sitting at their Apple laptops, have become absolute devotees of the movement. It is from them that a remarkable statement originates: “Open source has left the realm of philosophy”. This has certainly been true ever since Xi Jinping’s opening speech at the AI Summit in Shanghai (A single string does not make music, and a single tree does not make a forest.).
But even the classic ‘Power to the People’ OSS and FOSS scene is changing rapidly. Whilst we hear, particularly from Germany and the EU, the pitchfork mobs demanding that OSS projects should not be programmed using AI (‘vibe coding’), Linus Torvalds makes it clear – in essence: ‘Anyone who doesn’t want AI code in the Linux kernel is free to fork it.’ And Keno from Heise Ct says that manual programming will become as exotic as writing letters with a quill pen. It’s ridiculous for the simple reason that anyone using a modern IDE has been using at least autocomplete for years. What do you think that was? A little Chinese man inside the laptop?
The projects we’re already seeing are fascinating – such as Pewdeepie’s Odyseus or openClaw, or, as shown here in the picture, the OSPalntir war room dashboard WorldMonitor.App, which processes open data from all over the world using AI and makes it accessible to everyone—and can even be run using your own local AI. This is just the beginning.