Another Outlet

Arxiv, the popular preprint server, recently decided to penalize submitters of articles that contain non-existing references, presumably hallucinated by an AI. All authors will be sent to the doghouse, not just the first author. They’ll be blocked for a year from submitting new articles and will have their whole history reviewed, among other sanctions. While this new rule was generally met with…

Digital sovereignty is on everyone’s mind these days, and open source is seen as a critical enabler. But how, and at what costs? First off, it is not just about open source code. Next to code, you also need to consider your data and where it resides. The code and the data dimension then create the space of digital sovereignty (or the lack thereof). On the code dimension, you can have, ordered…

Nothing drives home the silliness of this early (LLM) AI frenzy better than a personal experience. Here is mine. Over twenty years ago, when I was a student at Stanford and rather poor (think six digit student loan), I was trying to make a cheese fondue for my friends. Problem was that the original ingredients were so expensive that I had to make do with what I could find at an affordable price.…

I’ll be on a panel at the UC Open Summit 2026 in a few hours. The moderator carved out for me the question: When should you make a COSS play? (She really liked that phrasing.) Here is my panel-size soundbite: The term “commercial open source” was coined as a marketing term by Clint Oram of SugarCRM, around 2004. SugarCRM provided their software as a commercial product, but also made it available…

You may have followed the ONLYOFFICE vs. Euro-Office kerfuffle about commercial open source licensing. Ascensio Systems SIA, the company behind ONLYOFFICE, a Microsoft Office like office suite, makes its money by selling commercial licenses to OPENOFFICE. Like many so-called commercial open source vendors, it provides its software under an open source license but also tries to keep others from…

I’m happy to report that the 40th article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. As always, please consider writing an article proposal! Abstract This article examines the evolutionary dynamics of the FreeCAD ecosystem by combining longitudinal OpenRank measurements with multidimensional collaboration network analysis, revealing a co-evolutionary pattern that supports…

Based on years of experience, and a fair bit of frustration, I have some recommendations about choice of words for journalists when writing about open-source software and its role in running data centers and enabling digital sovereignty. Open-source software vs. open source solution. This is the big one. Software is an artifact (code) and a solution typically is a product by a vendor. If you are…

tl;dr The future of vibe coding is end-user programming; another label for a larger danger. For a short moment, the web was abuzz about vibe coding, where non-professionals use a code AI and other assisting tools to develop software themselves. The idea was that anyone could vibe-code and that all the practices of professional software engineering didn’t really matter: You should go with the…

This MIT Technology Review article on “open source AI” argues that Chinese companies, with governmental backing, are embracing an open source approach to AI. They don’t, it is typically only open models that are being provided, not full-blown open source AIs. However, the story is appealing. Still the underdog when compared with the US, China is leveraging an open model strategy to unseat the…

I’m happy to report that the 39th article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. As always, please consider writing an article proposal! Abstract Open source communities are built on the engagement of people, and these engagements are subject to change. Open source communities can recognize and support role adaptation where members join, support, and exit communities as…

German agencies and ministries like to use Microsoft Office. But it is 2026, and we also know that at any time Prices could get jacked up Microsoft might violate European Union law A government decides to switch off access to Microsoft office Is this a problem solved by open-source software? Most commercial open-source software has a single vendor who at any time Might jack up prices Might…

Commercial open source firms make money by selling something that they don’t give away for free. If you’ve been following my writing or even attended my open source business workshop you know that I’ve been calling what companies sell the closed complement. Closed, because customers don’t get it for free, and complement, because it somehow sits next to the open-source software so that charging a…

On the heels of yesterday’s post on how AIs are not responsible for their advice, the inverse also holds true: You are responsible for your actions and can’t put the blame on an AI whose advice you followed. Grok correctly puts the blame on you and, possibly, on their owner for giving bad advice. None of this is new: Responsibility always lies with humans. Delegating tasks to a machine does not…

ChatGPT charmes, Grok apologizes, and (some) people seem to fall for it. There is no deliberate action, and there definitely is not responsibility that lies with the AI. It is tempting to anthropomorphize AIs, but if you ever wonder, here for your reference is what Grok has to say about who is responsible. Grok on who owns it Grok on who is responsible

One of my claims to fame is to have been the main architect and implementor of the first UML virtual machine. The idea was that developers should express their programs using UML (the Unified Modeling Language) rather than Java at the time, and that work would be faster, better, cheaper than if they hand-coded everything. After all, things got better once we moved from Assembly language to…

Open-source software can help digital sovereignty, but it is not enough. Many of the calls of open source enthusiasts, in my book, are even hurting, because they simplify and promise what can’t be promised. Myth: Open-source software will remove vendor lock-in and will make switching to alternative suppliers easy. Truth: All software locks you in, and real solutions are more than just software,…

I’m happy to report that the 38th article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. As always, please consider writing an article proposal! Title License-Compliant Distribution of Open Source Code Abstract This column previously discussed how to prepare your project or product by complying with key obligations like attribution and copyleft. This article now explains how…