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Open source was born in response to the fear that corporations were abusing copyright to enclose the creative commons of software. So, a movement of knowledge workers made a collective new deal to share freely the bounty of our intellectual labours. And with copyleft, some went further: we demanded that anyone raised up by standing on our shoulders must offer the same help to all, without bias or restriction.

Open source was born before the modern digital economy, back when the default was still to own things. But with the arrival (or return) of software-as-a-service, corporations like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google found a loophole. They could enrich themselves without sharing. They could climb up and kick away the ladder.

And now, with the birth of Generative AI, corporations like Midjourney and OpenAI charge a pretty penny for the service of taking from the creative commons of all digital creative expression. If they deign to share anything, it's under rules and licenses friendly to their balance sheets and their bottom line, enclosed by their donations to politicians and their legal threats.

And so now everything is open source, whether we like it or not.

Scott Robinson CC BY-NC-SA 4.0