From Grassroots to Global Infrastructure: The Reality and Crisis of Open Source

Over the last two decades, I’ve witnessed open source transform from a developer community phenomenon to the backbone of the global digital economy.

Today’s economy runs on open source, yet our approach hasn’t caught up. The ideas of community and individual contribution are not enough to sustain our current reality, and even fuel the current sustainability crisis.

Let me share what I’ve observed:

1. Incredible Scale: When I first chaired OSCON , open source was driven by passionate individuals and communities, and a relatively unknown corner of software development. Now, it powers everything from cloud platforms to AI systems. Foundations such as CNCF play host for the world’s largest companies to collaborate. The scale is staggering: projects can become critical infrastructure overnight. Yet, large burdens fall on a very small number of individuals who are still motivated by community principles, despite the billions of dollars made on the back of their efforts.
2. The Secure Infrastructure Gap: Despite its importance, adopters treat open source with a surprising lack of rigor. In my time leading open source strategy at Google, I saw how the disconnect between impact and support creates real risks¹. Today, securing the software supply chain is a critical and real need, but struggles to align this incentive with project maintainers. We’d like to think we never let unvetted code into our production systems, yet we don’t even know who is responsible for changes in some fundamental software infrastructure. Open source’s original ethos of individual contributions and community can’t meet the needs of securing software, and may even work against it.
3. The Sustainability Challenge: There’s a huge imbalance between the value created by open source and the support it receives. Thanks to permissive software licenses, anyone is free to profit from open source without contributing. Despite late-in-the-day efforts to contribute from large tech companies, the input is often negligible compared to the value extracted. Most work on important infrastructure is unglamorous, and misaligned with employers’ career incentives. Software foundations provide some assistance, but even that is thinly stretched and still relies on member corporations’ funding and priorities.

Looking Ahead: Government, Culture, And Foundations

As open source continues to underpin more of our digital infrastructure, we need new models of stewardship. We’ll see a continuing shift from viewing open source as free resources to critical infrastructure , and the rise of government as a driving force in securing and sustaining open source software.

This won’t be a comfortable journey. Open source has idealistic roots in autonomy, sharing, and a suspicion of corporate motives. Many of these ideals have been outgrown by adoption and now contribute to the sustainability crisis we endure. We have to be pragmatists.

Software foundations, initially the safe harbor for contributor companies, have the potential to transform into a means to channel resources from open source consumers into the infrastructure. Today, organizations such as the Linux Foundation are disproportionally reliant on big tech whales for their funding. Yet the mercurial motivations of vendor contributors cannot be relied on: once their strategic goals are met, interest wanes sharply.

If they are able to play this right, foundations can act as providers of “open source insurance” of a sort to their adopter members, creating economic models that support critical software infrastructure in the long term, secured by the far larger number of organizations that constitute the adopter community.

The free-wheeling open source of the past may be disappearing, but not open source itself. The big question is how we transition to structures that ensure its long-term health.