Open Source

The Wikimedia Foundation announced commercial partnerships through Wikimedia Enterprise with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity for structured API access to Wikipedia data for AI training. This formalizes relationships that previously involved unpaid scraping, creating a sustainable revenue model.

Baidu released its ERNIE 4.5 large language model as open source in June 2025, making advanced AI technology freely available to developers and researchers.

In April 2025, former Y Combinator president Geoff Ralston launched the Safe Artificial Intelligence Fund (SAIF), specifically seeking startups that enhance AI safety, security, and responsible deployment. The fund writes $100,000 checks as SAFE notes with a $10M cap. Ralston explicitly stated he would not back fully autonomous weapons, saying 'There are certainly uses of AI which would (will) be unsafe: using the technology to create bioweapons, to manage conventional weapons without a human in the loop.' Additionally, YC has funded 152+ open source startups including Ollama (105K+ GitHub stars).

Ng has consistently argued against broad AI regulation, warning that overregulation could stifle open-source innovation and benefit large incumbents. In January 2025, he expressed disappointment that Congress did not include a moratorium on state-level AI regulation in legislation, arguing that the net impact of proposed regulations was negative. He also criticized the White House Executive Order on AI for using the Defense Production Act framework.

In January 2025, Mullenweg deactivated WordPress.org accounts of several community members, including two planning to fork WordPress and the CEO of the WP Community Collective nonprofit. He also dissolved the WordPress sustainability team after learning it existed. Mullenweg acknowledged the lawsuits 'could potentially bankrupt me or force the closure of WordPress.org.'

Claude is not open source - source code, training datasets, and detailed architecture are not publicly available. Critics note contradiction between touting societal benefits while not open-sourcing most powerful models.

In October 2024, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman removed 11 Russian nationals from the MAINTAINERS file, citing vague 'compliance requirements.' The Software Freedom Conservancy later argued that the relevant US Executive Order 14071 did not legally require this removal. Critics noted the lack of transparency, the failure to credit removed developers, and the precedent of geopolitics influencing open source contributor access. Linus Torvalds defended the decision.

In 2024, the Tails privacy-focused operating system merged its operations with the Tor Project. Tails, which routes all internet traffic through Tor by default, had been a standalone project since 2009. The merger consolidated two key privacy infrastructure projects under one organizational umbrella, strengthening both.

In September 2024, Mullenweg publicly attacked WP Engine as a 'cancer to WordPress' and demanded 8% of revenue ($32M) as trademark licensing. When WP Engine declined, he blocked their access to WordPress.org, disrupting over a million websites. He then seized WP Engine's ACF plugin without review. WP Engine sued for extortion, unfair competition, and defamation. A court granted a preliminary injunction restoring WP Engine's access. 159 Automattic employees (8.4%) took buyout packages to leave.

In September 2024, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg escalated a trademark dispute with WP Engine by publicly calling them a 'cancer to WordPress,' blocking WP Engine's access to WordPress.org resources, and demanding they pay trademark licensing fees. WP Engine sued Automattic. The dispute disrupted the WordPress ecosystem and drew widespread criticism for using control of WordPress.org infrastructure as leverage in a commercial dispute.

In September 2024, Dahl launched a petition to cancel Oracle's trademark on 'JavaScript', gathering over 14,000 signatures. In November 2024, the Deno team filed a formal petition with the USPTO for cancellation, arguing Oracle has not used the trademark in commerce and its control harms the JavaScript community.

In mid-2024, Yann LeCun vocally opposed California's SB 1047 AI safety bill. He argued that making technology developers liable for bad uses would 'simply stop technology development' and would 'certainly stop the distribution of open source AI platforms, which will kill the entire AI ecosystem.' He called the bill based on an 'illusion of existential risk pushed by a handful of delusional think-tanks' and warned that without open-source AI, 'AI start-ups will just die.'

In March 2024, xAI released Grok-1 model weights under the Apache 2.0 license, and in August 2025 open-sourced Grok 2.5, with a promise to open-source Grok 3 within six months. Musk positioned this as fulfilling his commitment to open AI development, consistent with his earlier criticism of OpenAI for becoming closed-source. However, AI experts including Bruce Perens (creator of the Open Source Definition) noted that xAI released only model weights, not the training data or training process, making the 'open source' label disputed.

Cisco is a Platinum member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and a Platinum sponsor of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). The company is a top contributor to OpenTelemetry and the Kubernetes ecosystem, and launched Foundation AI, an open-source AI initiative for cybersecurity. Cisco's engineers serve in leadership roles across open source governance including as maintainers of key supply chain security projects.

Intel has been the top corporate contributor to the Linux kernel for more than 15 years, with over 19,000 engineers participating in more than 700 foundations and standards bodies. Intel contributes upstream to over 300 community-managed open source projects including Linux kernel, Kubernetes, OpenJDK, PyTorch, TensorFlow, LLVM, and GCC. The company has contributed to the open source software community since 1989, pushing contributions upstream to ensure cross-platform optimization and security.

In December 2023, IBM and Meta co-founded the AI Alliance, an international community that grew from 50 founding members to over 100 organizations focused on open-source AI development, safety, and responsible innovation. The Alliance promotes open AI models, shared research, and collaborative governance frameworks as alternatives to closed proprietary AI systems.

At KubeCon 2023, Oracle announced $3 million per year for three years in Ampere Arm-based compute credits on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Oracle is a founding member of the Linux Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and Java Community Process, maintains 1,400+ GitHub repositories with 5,000+ contributors, and is the top contributor for total lines of code changed across the Linux 6.1 kernel.

Mistral AI consistently released major models under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, including Mistral 7B (September 2023), the entire Mistral 3 family (December 2025), Magistral Small reasoning model (June 2025), and Devstral Small 2 (December 2025). The company stated this approach is 'about empowering the developer community and putting AI in people's hands,' promoting transparency and allowing users to examine algorithms to ensure ethical practices and minimize bias.

In August 2023, HashiCorp relicensed Terraform, Vault, Consul, and other products from the Mozilla Public License (open source) to the Business Source License (not open source). The move prompted the creation of OpenTofu, a community fork. Mitchell Hashimoto was an individual contributor at the time, not in a leadership role making this decision.

Coinbase launched the Base mainnet on August 9, 2023, an Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain built on the open-source OP Stack in collaboration with Optimism. In October 2023, Base open-sourced its code repositories, smart contracts, and web properties (base.org, docs.base.org, bridge.base.org) to increase transparency and allow public contributions. Base grew to become the largest Layer 2 network by total value locked. Coinbase also offered up to $1M in bug bounties through HackerOne and outlined a decentralization roadmap including fault proofs and diverse client software for censorship resistance.