The agency case for open source

Open source spent thirty years winning an argument about cost. AI is about to make that argument irrelevant. Whether open source can win the argument that replaces it (about agency) is an open question. The point of this post is to be honest about why. A note on "agency" I use the word throughout this post to mean the capacity to act on your own terms: to run, inspect, modify, and migrate your software without needing permission from a vendor, government, or infrastructure provider. It's the opposite of dependency. For native English speakers it may feel obvious; it's worth pinning down before we go further. To see what’s happening, you have to start with classical economics and take a detour through twenty-five years of SaaS. You end up at why the xz backdoor, the European Cyber Resilience Act, and the question of whether you can fork a language model are all the same story. Bear with me. The journey is the point. Where price comes from, classically Adam Smith, in Wealth of Nations…