I have been a staunch supporter of Open Source for a long time, including
[experiments](https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2023/11/19/cathedral-and-bazaaar-licensing/)
[in](https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/9/23/fsl-agpl-open-source-businesses/)
[funding](https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/9/19/open-source-tax/) [it](https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/10/14/mixing-oss-and-money/).
I’m a true believer in the idea that Open Source always wins in the long run, but not automatically and not quickly. Right now it is being stressed by AI slop, shifting contributor dynamics, the falling cost of producing code, and large companies learning to close doors behind them.
A lot of that battle today is manipulation of the narrative. Opinion makers on social media and in business circles increasingly frame access as irresponsibility. That is why the EU’s DMA matters, even if many people (including myself) reflexively hate EU regulation. Apple’s fight over delayed AI features in Europe is not about Brussels being annoying: it is about whether users can access their own devices and data. The phone is yours, the data is yours, yet Apple decides who may reach it and takes the agency away from you and then tries to make that sound like it is in your interest (supposedly it’s for your safety and security).
The closer you get to the core of AI, the more this shows up. Anthropic has every financial incentive to restrict what people can do with Mythos and Fable, and they wrap those restrictions in safety and (national) security language. Some restrictions may be defensible, but not all of them are. They trained their models on public works, then block Open Source attempts to learn from and distill these systems.
Disliking the EU, China, or any other large government should not make us forget that true democratized access to technology including AI is in all our interest. Some temporary product pain, including delayed Apple AI features, will be worth paying if it keeps gates open. We should not let companies own the narrative that preventing access is in our interest, particularly not as Europeans where the odds are already stacked against us by our underdeveloped capital markets, brain drain and internal fighting.