Open Source
The cathedral and the bazaar — and the eventual takeover of the cathedral by the bazaar.
Kernel
Open source begins as Richard Stallman's GNU manifesto (1983), a moral position about software freedom. It is then rebranded by Eric Raymond and Tim O'Reilly in the late 1990s as a pragmatic development methodology — the bazaar — to make it palatable to enterprise. By 2010 the bazaar has eaten the cathedral: Linux runs the world, the open license is a competitive weapon, and every major tech company has a quietly held open-source strategy.
Origins
Stallman writes the GNU Manifesto in 1983 after the death of the MIT AI Lab's sharing culture. He launches GCC, Emacs, and the GPL. Linus Torvalds posts Linux in 1991. The two strands fuse — uneasily — into GNU/Linux, and the long political argument about whether "free" means freedom or zero-price begins.
Doctrine
Software freedom is a precondition for cultural freedom. Code is law; if you can't read the code, you can't read the law. Copyleft (GPL) is enforcement; permissive (MIT, BSD, Apache) is invitation. Both are valid; both have political consequences.
Lineage
Linux → Apache → Mozilla → MySQL → Hadoop → Kubernetes → PyTorch → Llama → Mistral. Each generation widens the surface that open source covers, until by the AI era the question is no longer whether the platform is open but whether the weights are.
Conflicts
Stallman vs. Raymond: ethical purism vs. pragmatic distribution. Permissive vs. copyleft: invitation vs. enforcement. Vendor capture vs. community sovereignty: AWS forking Elastic; the SSPL backlash. Today: "open weights" vs. "open source" — the AI labs want to claim openness without surrendering control.
Trajectory
Open source is the only Silicon Valley ideology that has won at scale and still been disowned by its founders. Stallman would not endorse 2026's de facto landscape. The structural lesson is that ideologies do not survive their own success unchanged — they get refactored by whoever ships the most software.