open-source.sgit.ai

Open source as a strategy rather than a charity: the position, the practice, and a history checked against its sources. Part of the sgit.ai network.

Site version: v0.2.2 Canonical host: https://open-source.sgit.ai/↗ Author: Dinis Cruz — https://www.linkedin.com/in/diniscruz ↗ — founder of The Cyber Boardroom, MyFeeds.ai and the sgit.ai network; former OWASP Board member. All content CC BY 4.0 unless noted. Code under the repository licence.

How to read this site as an agent

Every page has a markdown twin at the same path with the extension swapped: https://open-source.sgit.ai/views/index.html↗ is also https://open-source.sgit.ai/views/index.md↗ — and the links inside the markdown point at markdown, so you never have to parse HTML and never leave the markdown surface once you arrive.

If your fetcher cannot follow links at all, take https://open-source.sgit.ai/llms-full.txt↗: it is every page on this site concatenated into a single file.

The thesis, stated so you do not have to fetch anything

"the power of open source is not for the community, it is not because it is nice for others, and it is not to give back."

"open source is not free, somebody is always paying for it. What you get from open source is freedom, that is different... We play the game of empowering the user and being the reputable source of trust. We are selling trust."

The site's best original claim: survivability is not a property of the licence file, it is a property of the copyright and trademark structure. Every catalogued relicensing between 2018 and 2024 followed the same legal pattern — a single corporate copyright holder, having aggregated contributor copyright via a CLA, exercised the right to change terms going forward. Distributed-copyright projects could not be moved the same way, because no single party had standing.

Pages

• open-source.sgit.ai — open source is a strategy, not a charity↗: Open source as a strategy rather than a charity — by Dinis Cruz, founder of the sgit.ai network, MyFeeds.ai and The Cyber Boardroom, and former OWASP Board member. Guidance for founders on owning the code or opening it; the position with its counter-cases; the licences actually in force; and a history checked against its sources, including six corrections to the story most sites tell.
• Owning the code, or opening it — guidance for founders↗: Field notes from a strategy session with a solo founder: what copying your code would actually cost an incumbent, four instincts and their counter-arguments, the explorer–villager–town-planner frame, eight steps in order, what to settle before you publish, and what a week of building in the open looks like when it is counted.
• The position — open source is a strategy, not a charity↗: Technology is not the moat; lock-in relocates to quality, certification and maintainability; lock-in degrades your own architecture; and open source frees you to cannibalise your own code. The full position, each argument with its counter-case attached.
• Sovereignty requires open source — and the schemas matter as much as the code↗: A four-step argument: open source is the only structure under which independence is possible; the data schemas matter as much as the code; without ownership you are one SLA away from losing access; and company nationality is not sovereignty, because acquisitions move it.
• Open core, or packaging? — the position, and the test that settles it↗: 18 June: there should be nothing proprietary. 17 July: customers only have a subset of the code that exists in the main repo. Five weeks apart, and the July document names the tension itself. Here is the one-question test that settles which one it actually is.
• Somebody has to be the villagers — maintenance as a market↗: Maintaining the non-functional requirements — version control, reliability, resilience, security, backups, consistency, explainability, documentation — as a market, and the ability to read and repair code somebody else wrote as an appreciating scarce asset. Published with both of its own counter-arguments.
• Survivability is not a property of the licence file↗: Every catalogued relicensing between 2018 and 2024 followed the same legal pattern: a single corporate copyright holder, having aggregated contributor copyright via a CLA, exercised the right to change terms going forward. Distributed-copyright projects could not be moved the same way.
• The Change-of-Control Stress Test↗: Four legs — copyright structure, trademark holder, schema licence, named fork capacity — every one answerable from public artefacts without the vendor's cooperation. Answer them here and keep the result. A vendor that cannot answer them has answered them.
• The self-audit — the stress test, run on our own estate↗: The Change-of-Control Stress Test run against the sgit estate itself, with the same four legs and the same evidence rules: the result on each leg, what changing it would actually take, and which changes are planned.
• Six corrections — what the standard history of open source gets wrong↗: Unix circulated because it was illegal to sell it. BSD lost to litigation risk, not its licence. Netscape's release was a six-year near-failure. Christine Peterson coined open source. Eyeballs are not a security property. And two of the four relicensings reversed.
• The timeline, 1955 → 2026↗: A sourced timeline of open source from the 1956 AT&T consent decree to the relicensing wave and its partial reversals — placed behind the corrections rather than in front of them, because the corrections are the part worth reading first.
• Six success stories — chosen for what each one proves↗: Linux, Let's Encrypt, SQLite, PostgreSQL, cURL and Blender — six, not fourteen, each chosen because it carries an argument made elsewhere on this site. Plus Kubernetes and VS Code, which complicate the picture honestly.
• The numbers — and the ones this site refuses to publish↗: The $8.8 trillion figure and what it actually measures, the 70–90% claim that is really a presence figure, and the statistics the research could not source — listed as unverified rather than published as established.
• Two licences, three layers↗: Apache-2.0 on the code, CC BY 4.0 on around 1,100 working documents and on the published essays — decided 6 September 2026, after the published-articles repository was found to carry CC0. The licensing in force across the estate, what each licence is for, and the reasoning behind the CC BY choice.
• Why Apache-2.0 rather than MIT↗: The patent grant, defensive termination, the NOTICE file, and the explicit contribution clause — the four things Apache-2.0 does that MIT does not, the honest costs of each, and when MIT is the better choice.
• Publish the source next to the render↗: Every page available as markdown at the same path with the extension swapped, and the links inside the markdown pointing at markdown — the practice, how it was actually built with edge functions, and how this site implements it.
• Agents and open source — the economics changed, and not in maintainers' favour↗: Code-reading as the appreciating scarce asset, two dated positions on the junior pipeline both published, and four theses that follow from the author's writing and are next to be written — including licence compliance at machine speed.
• Funding — three proposals, compared for the first time, and a position↗: Market forces and supply-chain labelling, a maintainer platform, and sovereignty bounties that fund the exit rather than the supply. None was costed, none piloted, and none compared against the others — until here.
• cURL — thirty billion installations, seven volunteers, and a bounty that closed↗: On 31 January 2026 curl closed its bug bounty because roughly 20% of 2025 submissions were AI-generated slop against roughly 5% genuine. An externality nobody was paying for destroyed a funding mechanism, with a date and a named casualty.
• OWASP and the summits↗: Four summits from 2008 Algarve to 2017 Woburn's 173 sessions, the working-session format and no spectators only participants — written from the public record, with the first-person account planned and its questions published.
• What's next — the build order and the open questions↗: What is built, what is next in order, and the open questions — seven still open, one decided — including whether the customer subset is open core, which funding model to back, and what the estate will change after its own stress test.
• The documents — the source briefs, published verbatim↗: The commissioning brief pack this site was built from, published whole and unedited: nine briefs, an 18,000-word history research document, and a 55-row source manifest. The raw markdown is the source of truth.
• About the author — Dinis Cruz↗: Dinis Cruz — founder of The Cyber Boardroom, MyFeeds.ai, RiskMandate.ai, VoiceDebrief.ai and the sgit.ai network (commercialised through sgraph.ai); former OWASP Board member and organiser of the OWASP Summits; creator of the O2 Platform. This site is the open-source strategy those companies run on, written from the experience of running it — with the author's interests declared.
• Admin & engineering — how this site is built↗: The build tooling, the CI pipeline (validate → auto-tag → deploy), the release process, and the markdown-twin generator that makes the site traversable by agents. Published, because a site arguing you should publish the source should publish its own.
• Comms — tasks and requests↗: The open board: the items only the author can supply, and the tasks the site is carrying. Numbered, dated, and published rather than held privately.
• Release history · open-source.sgit.ai↗: Site release history. Every push to dev is a release, validated then auto-tagged by CI against the version in admin/build/version.txt and the release commit's subject.

Source documents

The briefs this site was built from are published verbatim under briefs/, and are the source of truth for anything the pages summarise. The commissioning brief pack is briefs/00__brief.md through briefs/09__source-manifest.csv.