Open source is perceived by many as a synonym for freedom. After all, when you can see how a program works, modify it to suit your needs, and share it with others – that’s digital freedom, right? Alas, not always. Behind the bright signboard of “open source” sometimes there are restrictions, dependencies and interests that are far from the freedom of users. Here’s a look at why open source isn’t necessarily about true freedom.
Free software ideology and its erosion
The Free Software philosophy promoted by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) argues that what matters is not just access to code, but the rights of the individual to control the programs they use. These rights include:
- The freedom to run the program for any purpose,
- the freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to one’s own needs,
- the freedom to distribute copies,
- the freedom to improve the program and share improvements.
However, in 1998, part of the community began to promote the term open source as more “business friendly”. The goal was to make the movement more attractive to corporations by removing its ideological underpinnings. This worked, but the cost was that the original idea of protecting user rights was overshadowed. Open source came to mean “available for viewing”, but not necessarily “free”.
Open source does not mean fair play
Many companies use open source as a marketing tool. They publish the source code, but at the same time:
- impose additional paid modules;
- create so-called “open core” models, where the core is free, but key functions are paid for;
- license software so that it can be used, but cannot be really developed without legal risks.
Sometimes the development of the free version simply “stops”, and efforts are switched to the commercial product. As a result, users get an “undiscovered” system that looks free, but in fact is governed by corporate rules.
Community trap
Another problem is corporate takeover of projects. A popular project can be “taken over” by a large company. An example is when Facebook (Meta), Amazon or Google start using open-source libraries in their products, but don’t give the improvements back to the community. This creates a situation where volunteers work for free and the big players make the profits.
In some cases, developers get frustrated and stop supporting. And projects die despite the open license. This shows: access to code alone does not guarantee sustainability or equality in the community.
Protestware and the erosion of trust
Recent years have shown that even open source code can become a weapon of ideological or political struggle. Examples of protestware – when authors insert malicious or politically motivated changes into open-source projects – undermine the very essence of trust on which open source is built.
For example, in 2022, several npm packages began inserting anti-government messages or even corrupting files on developers’ systems if they were from certain countries. Formally, this was done through open source, but in fact it violated both technical and moral security of users.
Artificial Intelligence and the Cloud: The Illusion of Openness
With the emergence of large language models (such as LLaMA, GPT, Claude, etc.), a heated debate began: is a model “open source” if a company puts up weights but does not publish training code or training data? Meta, for example, calls LLaMA open source but limits its use to non-commercial purposes. Such a system is not truly open.
There’s also the problem that more and more software is running in the cloud. You can’t look at the code of the service you’re using, even if the “bulk” of it is supposedly open source. You have no control over updates, behavior, architecture – so you lose the very freedom that the Free Software philosophy talks about.
Conclusion
Open source has given the world many powerful tools, from Linux to Python, from Firefox to Blender. Without it, the modern Internet as we know it would not exist. But it is a dangerous misconception to take open source code as an automatic guarantee of freedom.
Freedom begins not with the license, but with the intention. If a project is built on the idea of respect for the user, on transparency, on equality in development – then it can be really free. And if business interests, artificial restrictions or ideological manipulation hide behind the open source code – it is not about freedom, but about control under the mask of openness.
Open source is a tool. And how to use it is a question of values.
