Why open source software matters in an AI world
Open source is great — but always remember that it offers benefits to companies beyond the software development process. Borland fumbled the ball with their open source efforts, but it soon became obvious how to leverage open source for corporate success. Or, as Stephen O’Grady argues in his book The New Kingmakers, developers are the ones who decide what technologies succeed. Companies quickly recognized that courting developers with open-source software and other free resources was the way to bring them into the fold. Because developers write all the software that makes a tool, platform, or application successful, it’s always a smart move to make developers happy.
It’s developers, now
AI hasn’t changed this equation. The latest incarnation can be seen from the company Nvidia. We think of Nvidia as a hardware company, cranking out GPUs as fast as they can. But GPUs don’t sell unless there is software that runs on them. Coding against a GPU in plain C++ was miserable, so Nvidia developed CUDA, a proprietary layer that made building for their hardware relatively easy. And the more CUDA is used, the more people depend on Nvidia hardware. This is not an accident. As Nader Khalil, Nvidia’s Director of Developer Technologies, told me, “You have to make the best hardware that you can, and you have to make the best software to utilize it. Software is the part of the stack that touches the user.”
Today, of course, developers are all about agentic coding, and Nvidia is eyeball deep in that world. As such, Nvidia provides a set of open-weight models called Nemotron that developers can use, inspect, and fine-tune for their own purposes. And of course Nemotron runs really well on top of CUDA.
