open-source

Published Soursen pieces tagged open-source, with the standfirst, the beat and the day the piece went up. Every fact is checked against the source.

Linux & open source

Siemens Deleted a Popular Open Source Project on Its Way Out the Door, and the AGPL Made Sure That…

In October 2026, months after buying Altair for $10.6 billion, Siemens retired the OpenRadioss website and deleted its GitHub repository, pointing users to a paid product. The code was under the AGPL, so within days a Rocky Linux founder had forked it into a new project called OpenCourant. I went through what happened, why deleting the repo was the self defeating part, and what the license actually guaranteed.

25 October 202610 min read

Linux & open source

The Linux Kernel Just Dropped Its AI Disclosure Tag, and the Fight Over It Says More Than the…

At the Maintainer Summit in Prague, the people who run the Linux kernel reached a rough consensus to deprecate the Assisted-by tag, the little line in a commit that says AI helped write it. I went through who proposed it, the real numbers behind it, and the argument it set off, including Linus Torvalds calling the whole idea of AI disclosure rules utterly stupid, because the kernel is quietly becoming one of the most AI touched projects in open source.

21 October 202612 min read

Linux & open source

The Internet Runs on Code Maintained by People You Have Never Heard Of.

The phone in your hand depends on a time zone file one UCLA lecturer updates in his spare time, a compression library written by the man who ran a Mars rover, and a shell whose entire public history is 1 person’s commits. I went through the real names, dates, and funding numbers behind the software holding up modern computing, because the gap between how much we lean on these projects and how little we pay for them is worse than the famous cartoon makes it look.

20 October 202612 min read