Can FOSS Bring “Open” to AI?

If I try to trace my roots in Open Source, I’d probably have to go back to my early days in the mid to late 1970s and the time I spent playing with my Commodore PET, then TRS-80 Level II, as well as all those other computers that would follow. Back then, if you wanted your personal computer to do anything at all, you’d learn to program. There were magazines with pages of code shared by other enthusiasts, and if something caught your attention, you’d sit at your old ( then, new) computer and carefully type in the code from the magazine. The next inevitable step involved carefully studying the code to find out where you made mistakes typing it in. The source was literally open, right there on the page.

Years later, I went to work in IT, initially doing tech support, then moved into systems administration (what you kids today call, “DevOps”). There were projects out there on the Internet to run email services, FTP servers, and other cool tools with names like Archie, or Gopher. In 1992, I first ran across something called “Linux” and the rest, as they say, is history. Okay, maybe not so simple. For me, though, and apparently a whole lot of other people, there was something really interesting happening around Linux that didn’t happen before. Suddenly, a globe-spanning community of people got the same bug, infected with that same feeling that something was different now.