OPEN-SOURCE

Open source is not charity. It's the most effective go-to-market strategy ever invented for enterprise software.

OpenAI closed their models. We opened ours. They chose profit. We chose community. The market will decide who was right, but I know which side has more developers.

AI should not be controlled by three companies in San Francisco. Open source is how we keep AI democratic. That's not idealism — it's survival strategy for everyone who isn't OpenAI or Google.

We started as a chatbot app for teenagers. It failed. Then we open-sourced our NLP library and accidentally became the GitHub of machine learning. Best pivot in AI history.

We open-sourced our first model via a torrent link. No blog post. No press release. Just a magnet link on Twitter. The AI community lost its mind. That was the point.

Stable Diffusion was downloaded 10 million times in two weeks. Ten million. It powered thousands of apps. And we captured almost none of that value. Turns out giving away your core product makes monetization tricky.

We open-sourced Stable Diffusion and gave it away for free. OpenAI charged for DALL-E. We gave it to the world. That decision made us famous. It also made it very hard to build a business.

I resigned as CEO. The board and I disagreed on the path forward. I believed in open source. They believed in revenue. Both are valid. They just point in different directions.

I wanted to democratize AI. I genuinely believe open-source AI is better for humanity than AI controlled by three companies. Whether Stability AI survives or not, the models are out there. The genie doesn't go back in the bottle.

Open-source AI is not charity. It is strategy. The companies that contribute to open models get to shape the standards everyone else builds on.

The future of AI is open source. Closed models will always have a place, but the ecosystem that wins is the one everyone can build on.

We open-sourced most of our trading technology. People thought we were crazy. But open source attracted the best developers in India to work with us, and that talent is worth more than any proprietary code.

I built Grafana as a side project because the existing dashboarding tools were ugly and inflexible. I open-sourced it because I thought maybe 50 people would care. Millions of people cared.

We give away the product for free and charge for convenience. That sounds like a terrible business model until you realize we have 60,000 GitHub stars and every DevOps engineer on the planet knows our name.

Netflix uses Grafana. NASA uses Grafana. Bloomberg uses Grafana. They all use it because it is the best visualization tool for time-series data, and they can run it themselves without asking us for permission.

We changed our license from BSD to BSL and the open-source purists lost their minds. But the alternative was watching AWS offer Sentry as a service and collect the revenue. Pragmatism beats ideology.

Modern software is 80% open-source code. Nobody was checking whether that code had vulnerabilities. That is why I started Snyk.

We hit one million databases in under four years. Turns out developers really do not like vendor lock-in.

We are building the open-source Firebase alternative. Everything Firebase does but you actually own your data.

Next.js is not a Vercel product. It is a community project that Vercel sponsors. The distinction matters.

The best way to compete with Google is to give developers something Google never will — the ability to leave.

I moved from Argentina to San Francisco as a teenager with basically nothing. Open source gave me a career before anyone gave me a chance.

Open source is not a business model. It is a distribution strategy. The business model is being the best place to run the open source.

If proprietary models win and open source dies our business dies too. We are all in on open source AI.

We host thousands of open-source AI models. If open source wins we win. That is the bet.

Competing with GitHub means competing with Microsoft. We do it by being open, transparent, and community-driven.

Open source built GitLab. Community trust is our most valuable asset.

Terraform manages billions of dollars of cloud infrastructure daily. That started as an open-source side project.

Every great open-source project solves a pain point that the author personally experienced.

The license change was hard. The community was angry. But we can't let AWS sell our free tool as a managed service forever.

Being better than free is hard. But when free means managing Kafka yourself, our managed service sells itself.

Open source built our community. The commercial product built our business. Both matter.

Every important open-source project lives on GitHub. The Linux kernel. React. TensorFlow. We host the world's software.

Open source is the most powerful force in software. AI will be the same.

Open-source RISC-V will do to Nvidia what Linux did to Windows Server.

Open-source infrastructure for public goods may be the highest return on philanthropic capital we can achieve. When the government adopts what you build, your investment multiplies a thousandfold.

Firefox is proof that you can build something excellent on the open web without being owned by anyone who wants to exploit you.

Open source is not just a development model. It is a values system about who gets to participate in building the future.

I am just a part of the community. The community built Wikipedia, not me.

I don't think any one company should control the future of AI. Open models are not just technically better — they're safer for humanity.

Stable Diffusion is the most downloaded AI model in history. We did not expect that. Nobody expected that.