You know, when you look at a modern city skyline,
your eyes are just immediately drawn to the glass,
right? The steel, the sweeping architectural
lines of those massive skyscrapers. Oh, yeah.
You admire the finished product. It's beautiful.
Exactly. But what you really don't think about,
what is completely invisible to you as you walk
down the street, are the millions of tons of
rebar and poured concrete buried deep underground.
Right. The foundation. The foundation is rarely
glamorous. It's definitely not the thing they
put on the tourism postcards. No, definitely
not. But if it cracks, the whole structure comes
down. And today we are taking a deep dive into
the digital equivalent of that buried concrete.
Welcome to another deep dive. We spent time poring
through an incredibly comprehensive Wikipedia
article on open source software. And the mission
today is to, well... to figure out a modern miracle.
It really is a miracle. It is. We want to uncover
how software that is given away entirely for
free, like no price tag, no strings, somehow
became the unseen trillion dollar backbone of
the entire digital world. Yeah, and it really
requires a massive conceptual shift to understand
because, you know, most of the time you probably
think of software as a physical product you buy
in a box. or maybe a closed app ecosystem that
a specific massive tech company owns and tightly
controls. Right, like buying a video game or
a word processor. Exactly. But the reality is
that the digital world you interact with every
single day actually runs on a massive decentralized
global system of open collaboration. And when
we say trillion dollar backbone, that is not
an exaggeration. Right out of the gate, the data
we're looking at drops just a staggering number.
Oh, the 2020. Yes. According to a 2024 estimate,
open source software brings an estimated $8 .8
trillion in value to firms. $8 .8 trillion. It's
mind boggling. It's wild. And if companies couldn't
just plug and play this free code, they would
have to spend three and a half times more than
they currently do, literally just to keep the
lights on. It's an astronomical figure. And to
understand how this $8 .8 trillion ecosystem
even functions today, we kind of have to look
backward. Back to the beginning. Right. Because
this entire phenomenon didn't start out as some,
you know, savvy boardroom business strategy.
It actually started out as a moral rebellion.
OK, let's unpack this because the history here
is. It's just fascinating. The research notes
that back in the early days of computing, we're
talking the 1950s and 60s, academic sharing of
code was just the default. It was just how things
were done. Yeah, programmers shared their work
freely to learn from each other and build better
machines. But then by the 1970s and 80s, a commercial
software industry really emerged, and companies
started locking things down. They realized there
was money to be made. Exactly. They moved to
what we call proprietary models, where they actually
hid the underlying source code from the people
buying it. And that lockdown completely fractured
the culture of programming, which introduces
us to a guy named Richard Stallman. Right, the
rebel. Yeah. In 1984, Stallman took a massive
stand. He actually quit his job at MIT. He was
specifically because the collaborative programmer
culture in his lab was being completely suffocated
by this new proprietary lockdown. He couldn't
handle the restrictions. Exactly. He couldn't
share his code. He couldn't tinker with other
people's code to fix basic problems. And he felt
this restriction was fundamentally, morally wrong.
So he decides to start a crusade. In 1985, he
founds the Free Software Foundation and creates
an operating system called GNU. Which is a huge
undertaking. Oh, absolutely. And just for anyone
listening who isn't, like a computer science
major, an operating system is essentially the
core set of instructions that tells your computer's
hardware how to actually run your programs. It's
the most foundational layer. Right, the concrete.
Yes. And Stallman had a very specific ethos for
this foundation. He famously argued that software
should be free, as in free speech, not free beer.
That phrase is just the perfect distillation
of his philosophy. He meant it's entirely about
the freedom to study the code, change the code,
and distribute the code. It wasn't necessarily
about the price tag at the register. The liberty
to do what you want with it. Exactly. To legally
enforce this philosophy, he created a fascinating
legal mechanism called copy left, and he formalized
it in something called the GNU General Public
License, or GPL. Copy left? I mean, it's a great
play on words, but how does that actually work
in practice? Well, think of traditional copyright
as a way to restrict who can use your work. Yeah,
sure. All rights reserved. Right. CopyLeft flips
that completely on its head. It legally requires
that if you take someone's free software, use
it, and modify it, you are legally bound to share
your newly modified version under those exact
same free terms. Oh, wow. So you can't just take
it and hide it. Nope. You can't take free code,
improve it, and then lock it away. It's basically
a viral license designed to legally guarantee
that software remains free forever. That makes
perfect sense for a moral crusade. But reading
through the history, there was a massive branding
problem here. The word free absolutely terrified
the business world in the 90s. Oh, yeah. Completely
alienated them. Because businesses hear free,
and they immediately think unreliable, unsupported,
or worst of all, anti -profit. You did. Corporate
executives just couldn't wrap their heads around
relying on something that didn't have a massive
company backing it with a warranty. So Stallman
is essentially like a master chef, insisting
every single diner gets his secret recipes, along
with a philosophical lecture about the moral
right to tweak those recipes. Right. But the
business world just wanted the free food without
the lecture. They wanted the benefits of shared
code without the activism. Is that why open source
kind of won out? That is a perfect way to look
at it. And that fundamental disconnect is what
caused a massive schism. In 1998, at a strategy
session held by free software supporters, a woman
named Christine Peterson suggested a new term,
open source. A total rebrand. Exactly. They were
actively looking for a term that would rebrand
the entire movement. They wanted to drop the
moral activism and highlight the pragmatic, highly
efficient Business -friendly potential of sharing
code. Just make it palatable for the boardroom.
Yeah. And this single meeting led to the creation
of the Open Source Initiative, or OSI. And Stallman
absolutely hated this. He detested it. And he
still does today. Yeah. Stallman views the term
open source as a total abandonment of the moral
fight. Really? How so? Well, for instance, he
points out that under the open source methodology,
you can develop highly restrictive software things
like digital rights management or DRM. Oh, the
digital locks on file? Exactly. Yeah. Locks that
dictate how you can use a file. You can build
those locks using open source methods, which
completely violates Stallman's core concept of
user freedom. So there's this deep philosophical
fault line. You have free software, which is
a rigid social and moral stance, and then open
source, which is just a practical way to develop
code faster. Right. And today, the community
often blends them into the acronym FOSS free
and open source software just to sort of keep
the peace. Exactly. But semantic battles aside,
the reality is that the business world embraced
the open source label and it completely took
off. Well, let's talk about how it took off because
the actual mechanics of building the software
is mind boggling. It really is. Here's where
it gets really interesting because on paper,
allowing anyone on the internet to just download
your core code, mess with it and submit changes
sounds like a recipe for absolute disaster. Complete
chaos. How do you build an operating system with
thousands of unpaid, unmanaged strangers without
it turning into complete digital rubble? To explain
that mechanical miracle, our research highlights
a highly influential 1997 essay. It's by Eric
S. Raymond, and it's called The Cathedral and
the Bazaar. Okay. Raymond used two very distinct
architectural metaphors to explain how software
gets made. The cathedral being the traditional
proprietary way. Yes. In traditional software
engineering, The cathedral, everything is highly
centralized. You have a few elite, highly skilled
architects who carefully plan every single feature
in total isolation. Behind closed doors. Exactly.
The rules are strictly defined. Access to the
code is heavily restricted behind corporate firewalls.
And the final product is only unveiled to the
public when they deem it completely finished
and perfect. An open source is the bazaar? The
bazaar is the exact opposite. It's decentralized,
it looks entirely unstructured from the outside,
roles burr together. Just people yelling and
trading in an open market. Yeah. But the most
crucial distinction is how it treats the people
actually using the software. In the cathedral,
users are just consumers. In the bazaar, users
are actively treated as co -developers. Oh, wow.
They are encouraged to download the beta, look
at the code, submit their own fixes, and aggressively
report bugs. But wait, my instinct is to push
back on this entirely. If I have thousands of
random people throwing code at a wall, how do
they not just constantly overwrite each other's
work and break the system faster? Sounds like
a nightmare, right? It really does. The text
talks about the bizarre model encouraging early
and frequent releases of buggy software. Releasing
buggy software to a chaotic crowd sounds terrible.
How does that actually result in a more reliable
end product? What's fascinating here is that
it seems counterintuitive until you understand
the underlying philosophy. Raymond dubbed it
Linus's Law, named after Linus Torvalds, the
creator of the Linux operating system. Okay,
what's the law? The law states, given enough
eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Meaning, if enough
people are staring at a problem, someone is bound
to spot the solution. Exactly. Think about how
a cathedral tests software. You have a small,
dedicated, quality assurance team sitting in
an office trying to guess and anticipate every
possible way a user might break the program.
Which is impossible. Right. They're limited by
their own imagination and their own hardware.
Right. But in the bizarre, when you release code
early and frequently, Every single user's computer
becomes a brand new, highly unique testing environment.
Oh, I see. You instantly have millions of diverse
machines running different hardware with different
software configurations, acting as a massive,
globally distributed QA team. So they find the
blind spots instantly. Exactly. If there is a
bug that only triggers when a specific graphics
card interacts with a specific keystroke, one
of those millions of users will find it instantly.
So the sheer volume of diverse users mathematically
overwhelms the small team of experts. But what
about the chaos of actually combining all their
fixes? That's where frequent integration comes
in. They don't just dump all the code into one
bucket. They use version control systems. Like
a filter? Yeah, think of it like a master blueprint.
You don't let anyone draw directly on the master.
People make a copy, draw their suggested changes,
and submit that copy for review. Ah, so someone
is still steering the ship. Right. The core maintainers
review those small bite -sized changes constantly
and merge them in. By doing this continuously,
they avoid the nightmare of trying to untangle
thousands of overlapping bugs at the very end
of a five -year project. The chaos is actually
a highly calibrated filter. It crowdsources the
peer review. That is brilliant. It really is.
And it perfectly explains why the massive corporate
cathedrals eventually realized they couldn't
keep up. I mean, they simply couldn't hire enough
testers to beat the bizarre, so they had to join
it. Which brings us to this incredible economic
paradox. Yes. The shift in the corporate attitude
toward open source is one of the starkest pivots
in tech history. Truly. I mean, in 2001, an executive
at Microsoft literally referred to open source
as an intellectual property destroyer. It was
viewed as an existential threat to the entire
software industry. But look at the data today.
More than 90 % of companies use open -source
software as a foundational component of their
proprietary products. 90%. And Microsoft itself
totally flipped. They now actively use it, they
are one of the biggest contributors to it, and
they've even integrated Linux into Windows. They
realize they had to adapt or die. But this creates
a fascinating puzzle for traditional economists.
Oh, so. Standard economic theory usually focuses
on the consumption of scarce resources. Like,
if I eat an apple, you physically cannot eat
that same apple. Right, supply and demand. But
open source software operates as a public good.
It is not scarce. If you download a web browser,
it doesn't stop me from downloading the exact
same browser. In fact, our research points out
that open source actually increases in value
the more people use it and contribute to it.
It completely denies normal supply and demand.
Because it relies on a totally different currency.
reputation and network effects. Oh, clout. Exactly.
A developer might spend a hundred hours writing
code for free, but in return, they build a massive
reputation among their peers globally. Which
pays off later. Yeah, that reputation translates
into lucrative job offers, consulting gigs and
massive influence. The producer is essentially
consuming the social benefit of their own free
labor. It's an economy driven by clout and shared
utility rather than, you know, direct point of
sale transactions. Exactly. But for major corporations
to play in this bazaar without getting sued into
oblivion, there has to be some serious legal
glue holding it all together. And the documentation
breaks down the licensing into two main camps,
permissive licenses and copy left licenses. Understanding
the difference between these two is really the
master key to seeing how corporations actually
navigate this space today. Right. Both types
grant you broad rights to use and modify the
code. But they have violently different rules
for what you are allowed to do after you make
those changes Okay, let me try an analogy here
to see if I have this right So a permissive license
like the MIT or Apache licenses that are mentioned
a lot in the source is like me saying Here is
my grandmother's amazing award -winning cake
recipe. Okay, I'm with you Do whatever you want
with it. You can bake it. You can change the
frosting. You can even put the final cake in
a fancy box and sell it at a bakery for profit.
Yes. And crucially, you don't own anything. And
you don't have to tell anyone else how you made
your specific version of the frosting. So no
strings attached. Right. Permissive licenses.
Let a company take open source code, build an
app on top of it, and then make that final polished
app completely proprietary and closed source.
Got it. But a CopyLeft license -like Richard
Stallman's GPL that we talked about earlier is
different. That's like saying, here's the cake
recipe, but if you add a secret ingredient to
it to make it better, you are legally obligated
to. To publish your new updated recipe for free
for everyone else to use. Exactly. CopyLeft forces
any derivative works to stay in the open source
ecosystem. you cannot lock the new version back
up. And this explains so much corporate behavior.
I mean, if I'm a massive tech company, I am heavily
favoring permissive licenses. As much as you
are. It lets me take the incredible free foundation
built by millions of volunteers in the bazaar,
put a fresh coat of paint on it, and then lock
it behind a proprietary paywall to sell. which
leads to a growing and frankly controversial
trend known as open sourcing. OK, what is that?
Companies will release the bare bones foundation
of their software under an open license, hoping
to attract free volunteer developers to fix their
bugs and improve the core code. Like Tom Sawyer
getting people to paint the fence for him. Exactly
like that. But they keep all the premium features
closed off. It's a very one sided relationship.
It sounds like they are basically mining the
bizarre for free labor. It is a huge point of
tension within the community today. Because if
trillion -dollar corporations extract all this
value without pumping enough resources like,
you know, funding or developer time back into
the ecosystem, the foundation could eventually
crack. So what does this all mean? I mean, if
this invisible architecture is running our banking
systems, our hospitals, and our phones, and generating
trillions in value, who exactly is pouring the
concrete? It's a great question. Who are the
actual human beings typing the code? And how
are world governments reacting to the fact that
their critical infrastructure relies on a decentralized
bizarre? Well, if you look at the demographic
data, it strips away a lot of the utopian myths.
Yeah, it really does. You might picture this
perfectly distributed global network, but contributors
heavily cluster in specific established tech
hubs. The U .S., China, Germany, India, and the
UK dominate the contributions. Does that make
sense? But the most jarring statistic is the
massive disparity regarding gender. I'm completely
stunned reading this. The data shows that in
2002, only 1 .5 % of international open source
developers were women. 1 .5%. It's nothing. And
even tracking it across a massive timeline from
2005 to 2021, that number only rose to 9 .8%.
It is vastly unrepresentative of the general
tech workforce. It is. And it directly challenges
one of the community's most deeply held myths.
Which one? The idea of a pure meritocracy. There's
this pervasive belief in the bizarre that code
is all that matters that because you are just
the screen name on a forum Nobody cares who you
are as long as your code compiles, right? It
sounds very egalitarian But the research completely
dismantles that myth completely when a contributor's
gender is Identifiable as female in these forums
or platforms. They face measurable systemic biases.
It's in the data Yeah, they experience much longer
feedback times when they submit code, their work
is scrutinized far more heavily, and they have
lower overall acceptance rates for their contributions
compared to their male peers. And it goes beyond
just code acceptance. They are frequently pushed
by the community toward less technical housekeeping
roles. Like what? Like manual testing, managing
the community, or writing documentation. And
this happens despite internal research showing
they have equal productivity and capability in
actual coding. That is incredibly frustrating.
It is. So even in a supposedly open, borderless
ecosystem, human biases are deeply hard -coded
into the culture. It's a sobering reality. And
that human element, the fact that this is built
by real people with biases and vulnerabilities,
becomes terrifying when you zoom out to the geopolitical
level. Oh, absolutely. World governments have
suddenly woken up to the fact that they are entirely
dependent on this volunteer -maintained software.
It's not just a hobbyist tool anymore. It is
critical national infrastructure. And governments
are just scrambling to figure out how to harness
the economic power of the bizarre while actively
protecting their national security from it. The
examples here are fascinating. Look at France.
They implemented a proactive policy to heavily
favor free and open source software within their
government agencies. Right. By simply driving
demand toward open source, they generated an
estimated 18 % increase in tech startups across
the country. It acted as a massive economic engine.
But then you have the defensive posture. like
the United States Department of Defense. Oh,
right. They utilize open source software extensively,
but they have to screen it relentlessly. They
evaluate the integrity of the code and they are
specifically hunting for foreign governmental
influence. Wait, I have to jump in here. If open
source code is public and anyone can read it,
how would a spy or a foreign government hide
malicious code? Wouldn't one of those millions
of eyeballs spot it immediately? Well, they don't
attack the main fortress. They attack the supply
chain. What do you mean? Modern software relies
on dependencies. If you build an app, you don't
write the code to render a JPEG image from scratch.
Right. I guess I'd just use a tool for that.
Exactly. You just plug in an existing open source
component that does it for you. Your app is now
dependent on that tiny piece of code. OK, I follow.
Bad actors will target obscure, forgotten subcomponents
that are maintained by maybe one or two burned
out volunteers. If they can slip a vulnerability
into that tiny component, it gets pulled into
the massive cathedral projects automatically.
Oh, wow. That is terrifying. It is. Which is
why this is also becoming a weapon of technological
independence. Look at China. The Huawei situation.
Yes. In 2019, amidst global trade tensions, the
Chinese telecom giant Huawei was blocked from
using Google's proprietary Android ecosystem.
Right. Completely cut off. In response, they
accelerated the building of their own alternative
operating system, Harmony OS. And they heavily
relied on the open source model to bypass those
international restrictions and rapidly build
out their own infrastructure. And then you have
countries like Germany who are realizing they
just need to pay for the concrete. Exactly. They
established the Sovereign Tech Fund. Right. Which
uses government money to financially support
the independent maintainers of these vital open
source tools. They are literally paying to reinforce
the invisible foundation before it collapses.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, we
are witnessing a massive paradigm shift in how
global power operates. Governments are walking
a razor -thin tightrope. They desperately need
the incredible, rapid technological innovation
that only comes from open, borderless collaboration.
Because they can't afford to build their own
cathedrals from scratch. Right. But they are
terrified of what might be lurking in the shadows
of the bazaar. They are acutely aware of the
vulnerabilities. This tension between open collaboration
and localized national security is going to define
the next decade of technology. It really forces
you to look at the digital world through a completely
different lens. I mean, the next time you open
your web browser or launch an app on your smartphone
or even just read an article online. Take a moment
to realize what you are actually touching. It's
all connected. The invisible architecture of
your digital life wasn't just built in a sleek
corporate boardroom by people in suits. It was
built in a chaotic, messy, global bazaar. It's
an unlikely alliance of moral idealists, weekend
hackers, and trillion dollar corporate giants
all somehow agreeing to share the exact same
digital bricks. And the most provocative detail
from all our research suggests that this collaborative
model might not stay confined to your screen.
for much longer. There's a brief but fascinating
mention of the term open source expanding into
movements like open source ecology. Open source
ecology, what does that actually look like in
practice? It's the ambition to completely decentralize
physical technology. It takes the exact same
principles of the software bizarre, you know,
open blueprints, shared schematics, collaborative
problem -solving, and applies them to hardware.
The hardware? Like what? We're talking about
open source tractors, 3D printed housing, and
medical equipment. Wow. So if the open source
bazaar could disrupt the proprietary software
industry to the tune of 8 .8 trillion dollars,
what happens when we fully unleash that model
on the physical world? It changes everything.
Will we soon be downloading and tweaking the
blueprints for our cars, our medical devices,
or our homes just as easily as we download a
new web browser today? The digital revolution
you're holding in your hand right now might just
be a preview of a much larger physical revolution.
A physical foundation built by everyone for everyone.
Something to think about the next time you log
on. Until next time, keep diving deep.