This week’s lead story looks at Cal.com moving its core codebase behind closed doors, as the company argues that AI-driven vulnerability discovery is making open development harder to defend.

Elsewhere, Expo hires Meta’s former React lead as it raises fresh funding and launches a new agent for building mobile apps; France pushes ahead with plans to move public systems from Windows to Linux; and a mix of security issues, new tools, and governance updates continue to shape the open-source ecosystem.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

<Open issue>

Cal.com draws a line under open source

AI is putting new pressure on open source. Maintainers are already battling a surge of machine-generated “AI slop,” but the bigger challenge might be just beginning: tools that can scan codebases and surface vulnerabilities at scale.

Last week I reported on Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and Project Glasswing, and the rise of AI systems that can hunt for vulnerabilities in widely used software. This week, Cal.com, an open-source Calendly alternative that provides scheduling infrastructure for developers, is pushing its core codebase behind closed doors.

Cal.com has moved its main production codebase into a private repository, while releasing a stripped-down, MIT-licensed community version called Cal.diy for self-hosting.

CEO Bailey Pumfleet argues that openness now comes with a cost. He said access to source code lowers the barrier to finding weaknesses. “It’s easier to perform a bank heist if you have the blueprints to the vault,” Pumfleet said. “It’s a lot easier to see the inner workings of something and reverse engineer it to find a vulnerability.”

Asked whether stronger hardening could offset the risk, Pumfleet said: “Simply having the code open increases the risk dramatically.

“It’s not closing the code or hardening it; it’s just that we’re doing both,” he continued. “Simply hardening it does not decrease the risk enough.”

The argument arrives as tools like Mythos have shown they can uncover vulnerabilities that sat undetected for decades, including a flaw in OpenBSD dating back 27 years.

Not everyone accepts this logic, however. Critics argue that closing code reduces the number of people who can find and fix bugs, and that security depends on scrutiny rather than secrecy. Others suggest the move reflects commercial pressure dressed up as a security decision.

Developer Simon Willison pointed to recent analysis by Drew Breunig, which argues that AI-driven vulnerability discovery raises the cost of securing software for everyone — and that open source helps spread that burden across a wider pool of contributors, rather than concentrating it within a single company.

Pumfleet, for his part, agrees with this view, but said that it all comes down to a question of resources. He said approaches that rely on continuous, large-scale analysis would require budgets Cal.com doesn’t have, adding that closing the codebase is “the biggest method of risk reduction we can take right now to secure our customers.”

There is also a longer history behind such actions. Companies built on open source have frequently restricted access to parts of their codebases — whether through licensing changes, enterprise carve-outs, or fully closing core components. That context has led some critics to question whether security is the sole driver here, or whether it also serves as a justification for tighter control.

Pumfleet rejects that framing. “The decision is entirely about security,” he said. “We already have control over the product being open source, and we don’t really stand to gain much from being closed source. It’s really just a question about de-risking on the security side.”

Read more: The New Stack | Cal.com | Drew Breunig

<Patch notes>

Expo hires Meta’s React lead, launches agent, nabs $45M

Open-source React Native development platform Expo has hired Meta’s former React lead Seth Webster, who most recently emerged as executive director of the all-new React Foundation after Meta donated the project.

In tandem, Expo also announced $45 million in funding and the launch of Expo Agent. Expo sits on top of React Native, handling much of the infrastructure needed to ship apps, and it’s now pushing into agent-driven development by combining code generation with deployment and testing.

Read my interview with Seth Webster for The New Stack on the link below.

Read more: The New Stack

France ditches Windows for Linux

In yet another sovereign tech push from Europe, France is moving public sector systems off Windows and onto Linux to reduce reliance on US tech vendors.

Read more: TechCrunch

EU age-checking app already cracked

The EU is rolling out an open-source age verification app, but hackers say they broke it in minutes. It raises questions about whether these systems can actually protect kids—or just create new risks.

Read more: European Commission | Politico

Backdoors found in WordPress plugins

Dozens of WordPress plugins used by thousands of sites were found with hidden backdoors.

Read more: TechCrunch

Microsoft shares Surface data with Linux Foundation

Microsoft is handing over key Surface device data to the Linux Foundation’s Battery Data Alliance to help improve battery life on Linux.

Read more: TechRadar

Nvidia launches quantum-focused AI models

Nvidia unveiled new open models aimed at accelerating quantum computing research.

Read more: Tom’s Hardware | Nvidia

Mozilla launches Thunderbolt AI client

Mozilla has launched a new AI client called Thunderbolt, focused on running models locally or in self-hosted setups. The pitch is tighter control over data and infrastructure, aimed at developers and teams who don’t want to rely on hosted AI services.

Read more: Ars Technica | Thunderbolt

Vercel open-sources AI agent framework

Vercel released Open Agents, a toolkit for building custom AI coding agents. The idea is to let companies run their own agents on their own infrastructure, rather than relying on hosted tools.

Read more: Tessl

Laude’s moonshots

Laude Institute, a nonprofit funding critical open research, has unveiled eight academic teams as finalists in its new “Moonshots” program. The groups are working in the open and will compete over the next six months for $10M lab-scale funding to help solve “humanity’s hardest problems.”

Read more: Laude Institute

OSI names new executive director

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has appointed Duane O'Brien as executive director, some six months after his predecessor Stefano Maffulli announced he was stepping down.

Read more: The Open Source Initiative

<Final commit>

Linux allows AI! But not the sloppy kind…

Linux 7 landed this week, bringing the usual mix of hardware support updates, performance tweaks, and under-the-hood changes that keep the kernel ticking.

However, arguably the more interesting facet was a little tidbit that came alongside it: a new policy on AI-assisted contributions to the kernel. AI tools are officially allowed, but with important caveats.

AI agents mustn’t add “Signed-off-by” tags, with only humans able to legally certify the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO).

As per official documentation, the human submitter is responsible for:

• Reviewing all AI-generated code

• Ensuring compliance with licensing requirements

• Adding their own Signed-off-by tag to certify the DCO

• Taking full responsibility for the contribution

Put simply, AI is allowed, but no slop.

Read more: The Register | GitHub

This week’s lead story looks at Project Glasswing, an effort to bring frontier AI security tools into the hands of open-source maintainers (though not exclusively), as models like Anthropic’s Claude Mythos begin to uncover vulnerabilities that have gone undetected for decades.

Elsewhere, there’s a continued push toward open messaging infrastructure in Europe, new tools to secure AI agents, and a mix of projects and platforms shaping how open infrastructure is built and governed, and more.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

<Open issue>

Glasswing brings frontier AI to open source security

Anthropic says its shiny new, cutting-edge Claude Mythos model has reached a level of coding and security capability where it can find and exploit software vulnerabilities that survived years — and in some cases decades — of human review.

While the ramifications of this are far-reaching, Mythos is a big deal for the open source world in particular. Through Project Glasswing, the Linux Foundation, Anthropic, and a group of large tech companies including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are putting Mythos to work on defensive security across critical software systems, including widely used open-source projects.

Anthropic is committing up to $100 million in usage credits to the effort, alongside $2.5 million for Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF through the Linux Foundation, plus $1.5 million for the Apache Software Foundation.

“Open source security has historically been a thankless task,” The Linux Foundation’s CEO Jim Zemlin wrote. “Triaging and fixing bugs, writing and testing patches, crafting careful communications strategies – none of this is what maintainers had in mind when they sent their first project commit. We believe AI can help address this.”

Open source underpins much of the modern software stack, but many maintainers are already overwhelmed by bug reports, supply chain attacks, and AI-generated noise. Now they may also have to contend with AI systems that are exceptionally good at surfacing zero-days.

To underscore this point, Anthropic published a handful of examples. Mythos, it said, found a flaw in OpenBSD, a security-focused operating system, dating back 27 years.

In short, Glasswing isn’t just about AI helping create patches a bit faster. It’s about getting frontier defensive capability into the hands of maintainers before the same class of models is used more aggressively elsewhere.

Zemlin stressed that access — not just capability — will determine whether these tools actually help the open-source ecosystem.

“Because the dark side of AI-augmented security is AI-augmented insecurity, we must ensure that access to the best AI cybersecurity tooling is evenly distributed and not concentrated in the hands of the few with the cash and the headcount,” Zemlin noted. “None of this matters if the cost is prohibitive. Project Glasswing is designed to ensure that maintainers get access to these tools for free. This is the only way to foster wide adoption of top AI cybersecurity capabilities – by removing any economic friction.”

Read more: The New Stack & The Linux Foundation & Glasswing & Mythos Preview

<Patch notes>

A ‘beam of light’ for EU sovereignty

Belgium is rolling out a Matrix-based messaging app for government use, in a push toward digital sovereignty. The move leans on open protocols to reduce reliance on proprietary communication platforms.

Read more: Resilience Media

Microsoft open-sources agent security toolkit

Microsoft released the Agent Governance Toolkit, an open-source runtime security layer for AI agents. The project focuses on monitoring behaviour and enforcing guardrails as agents take on more tasks autonomously.

Read more: Microsoft & GitHub

A ‘spiritual successor to WordPress’

Cloudflare has unveiled Emdash, a new open-source CMS positioned as a modern, serverless successor to WordPress. WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg said the project was likely designed to drive usage of Cloudflare’s own services, though overall he was complementary of the project.

Read more: Cloudflare & GitHub & Matt Mullenweg

Google releases Gemma 4

Google has launched Gemma 4, the latest version of its open model family aimed at developers. The release continues Google’s push to provide smaller, more accessible models alongside its closed systems.

Read more: Google

Netflix goes into the VOID

Netflix has released VOID, an open-source model that removes objects from video — including their effects on the scene, such as shadows, reflections, and physical interactions. The model builds on CogVideoX and is fine-tuned for interaction-aware video editing in post-production.

Read more: Forbes & VOID (GitHub)

Meta shifts on open models

Meta this week introduced Muse Spark, its first frontier model and the first without open weights, marking a break from its earlier approach. The company says it still plans to release some models openly, though questions remain over how far that commitment will go.

Read more: Meta & Axios & The New Stack

Microsoft deactivates dev accounts

Microsoft deactivated two notable open source developer accounts as part of a new developer verification program, raising concerns about access and control over software distribution platforms. The move highlights ongoing tension between platform governance and open development.

Read more: The Register

<Final commit>

A DIY retro camera

An open-source camera project called Saturnix is gaining a little steam, built around a Raspberry Pi with a 16MP sensor and styled after point-and-shoot cameras from the 1990s.

It’s not a finished product you can buy. Instead, the creator has published the design files, code, and instructions, so users assemble it themselves using off-the-shelf parts like a Raspberry Pi, camera module, and custom 3D-printed case.

The appeal is in that setup: the software can be modified, and the hardware can be rebuilt or adapted as needed. It’s still early, but it offers a glimpse of what open hardware can look like when the full stack — from casing to code — is available to the user.

Read more: Hackaday & GitHub

This week’s lead story looks at the launch of Betterleaks, a new open-source secrets scanner from the creator of Gitleaks, and what it says about how security tooling — and ownership — is evolving in the AI era.

Elsewhere, China is pulling ahead on open AI models much to the chagrin of the US; Google expands Android Automotive deeper into the car stack; Cisco rolls out a new open-source tool to secure AI systems; and a fresh round of donations and project graduations points to continued momentum in open infrastructure and governance.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

<Open issue>

Secrets scanning for the agentic era

Gitleaks is one of the most popular open-source secret scanning tools, ratcheting up more than 25,000 GitHub stars and tens of millions of downloads since its launch in 2018.

Now, Gitleaks creator Zach Rice is starting afresh with Betterleaks, a new open-source scanner designed to catch exposed credentials — API keys, tokens, passwords — as code is written and shared.

So… why launch a new thing when the old thing was seemingly doing so well? The answer traces back to Rice’s move to Truffle Security in 2023, where his focus shifted to rival open-source scanner TruffleHog. Development on Gitleaks slowed, he said, and Rice no longer had full control over the project.

Betterleaks is positioned as a continuation — a drop-in replacement, with existing commands and configurations still working, but with a reworked detection approach, faster scanning, and more flexibility over how secrets are identified and validated.

Rice says the goal is to keep moving development forward without forcing the existing community to migrate.

“Hopefully it’s not going to cause too much of a backlash to the community – I love the Gitleaks community, and I don’t want to fracture that,” Rice told me in an interview for The New Stack this week. “So if you want to continue using Gitleaks, feel free. It’s stable — and security patches and stuff like that, I’ll continue to do. But if you want the next generation of Gitleaks and the evolution, then switch to Betterleaks.”

Betterleaks is also being built with AI-assisted development in mind. As more code is generated quickly — often with less review — the risk of accidentally exposing credentials increases.

The project is sponsored by Aikido, a billion-dollar security startup that’s backing a broad array of open source security tooling, including OpenGrep, Zen, and Safe Chain.

Betterleaks, for its part, is available under an MIT license, with Rice retaining ownership. It’s also worth noting that there are no plans to build a commercial entity off the back of Betterleaks — the focus, instead, is on building and maintaining a tool that others can rely on, even competitors.

“Like what Aikido did with OpenGrep (forked Semgrep) we’re dedicated to providing really great open source projects for the security community,” Rice said. “A strong open source project is the backbone of a lot of the security products out there. Yes, it’s beneficial to other companies, but it’s also really beneficial to Aikido to have these stable projects.”

Read more: The New Stack

<Patch notes>

China leads on open AI models

As per a recent report from Hugging Face, Chinese AI labs are leading on open AI models — though not the infrastructure behind them (that’s Nvidia) — with data showing they dominate downloads and usage globally. In turn, this is raising concerns among US policymakers that China’s warm embrace of open AI models could erode the US’s lead in AI development.

Read more: The New Stack & Hugging Face & SCMP

Android Automotive moves beyond infotainment

Google is expanding its Android Automotive OS to handle more of the car’s internal systems beyond infotainment, as vehicles shift toward software-defined architectures.

Read more: The Verge

Cisco launches DefenseClaw

Cisco this week introduced DefenseClaw, an open-source tool for monitoring AI agents and detecting issues like prompt injection and unsafe tool.

Read more: Cisco

Fivetran donates SQLMesh to Linux Foundation

Data integration giant Fivetran has donated SQLMesh, its open-source data transformation framework, to the Linux Foundation.

Read more: The New Stack

Tekton and Fluid move up at CNCF

Tekton, a Kubernetes-native CI/CD framework, and Fluid, a data orchestration system for AI and big data workloads, have both been promoted to incubating status by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Read more: CNCF and CNCF

<Final commit>

Built on open, sold as new

AI coding company Cursor last week launched Composer 2, an AI model designed to handle longer programming tasks at lower cost.

However, arguably the more interesting detail is that it’s built on Kimi K2.5, an open model from Chinese AI company Moonshot AI. This helps demonstrate how smaller players can build competitive products without training frontier systems like those from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google.

That detail only emerged after developers dug into the system, prompting criticism over how the underlying model was credited (or not) — a long-running tension in the open source sphere.

It’s a reminder that open models are changing who is able to compete, while raising fresh questions about who gets the credit.

Read more: Tessl & VentureBeat

This week’s lead story looks at OpenAI’s move to acquire Astral, the company behind popular open-source Python tools Ruff and uv, as it continues to pull widely used developer tools and viral projects into its orbit.

Elsewhere, there’s fresh funding for open-source security, growing corporate interest around OpenClaw, and a lot more.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

<Open issue>

OpenAI’s Astral projection

OpenAI this week announced plans to acquire Astral, the company behind widely used open-source Python tools including Ruff and uv. The plan is to fold Astral into OpenAI’s Codex team, which builds the company’s AI coding agent, and connect Codex “more directly with the tools developers already use.”

Astral has built a following by replacing slower, fragmented Python tooling with faster, unified alternatives. Ruff acts as a high-speed linter and formatter, while uv rethinks package management and environments — both designed to speed up day-to-day development.

The deal gives OpenAI a foothold in the tooling developers actually use when writing and running code, far beyond the model layer.

The move follows OpenAI bringing in the creator of OpenClaw, the viral open-source agent that spread quickly as developers forked and adapted it. It also comes alongside a separate deal for Promptfoo, an open-source testing tool.

While OpenAI mostly abandoned its open-source roots a long time ago, these recent deals are a tacit acknowledgement of the power of open source — and the communities that drive it.

Astral’s tools have grown rapidly these past few years, reaching hundreds of millions of downloads per month and becoming a mainstay of modern Python development. Founder and CEO Charlie Marsh said that growth exceeded expectations.

“Open source is at the heart of that impact and the heart of that story; it sits at the center of everything we do,” Marsh wrote. “In line with our philosophy…. OpenAI will continue supporting our open source tools after the deal closes. We'll keep building in the open, alongside our community – and for the broader Python ecosystem – just as we have from the start.”

Read more: OpenAI & Astral

<Patch notes>

$12.5M for open source security

The Linux Foundation has secured $12.5 million in new funding from major tech firms — including Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and OpenAI — to support open-source security projects. The effort targets long-standing gaps in maintaining widely used but under-resourced infrastructure.

Read more: Press release

Germany backs open document standards

Germany’s sovereign digital stack will mandate the Open Document Format (ODF) — an open, standardised file format used by office suites like LibreOffice — reinforcing a shift away from proprietary file formats in public sector systems. The move aims to improve interoperability and reduce vendor lock-in.

Read more: The Document Foundation

MCP maps next steps

The folks behind the Model Context Protocol (MCP) have outlined a set of priorities for 2026, including better support for remote servers, improved scaling, and clearer agent-to-tool communication — all designed to make it easier for agents to connect reliably to external tools and data.

Read more: The New Stack

Tencent backs OpenClaw after copycat complaint

Chinese tech giant Tencent has moved to sponsor OpenClaw after complaints from its creator Peter Steinberger about copycat projects.

Read more: SCMP

Chainguard bolsters software supply chain

Software supply chain security company Chainguard has launched a central repository of hardened open-source packages and container images, designed to reduce risks in dependencies.

Read more: The New Stack

OpenClaw gets guardrails

After Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called OpenClaw “the next ChatGPT,” Nvidia has introduced a project dubbed Nemoclaw to add guardrails to the open-source agent. The effort reflects growing interest in making autonomous systems safer for more serious enterprise deployment.

Read more: The New Stack

<Final commit>

A browser built for bots

Open-source headless browser Lightpanda this week added support for Web Bot Auth, a protocol designed to let automated agents securely identify themselves and access websites without being treated as malicious traffic.

The project itself isn’t new. Lightpanda has been around since 2022, but is gaining attention as developers seek infrastructure built for AI systems. It’s a browser written from scratch for machines, rather than humans — no rendering engine, just the parts needed to load pages and run JavaScript.

That stripped-down design makes it far lighter than Chrome, which still carries decades of features meant for people. Lightpanda remains in beta, but with strong early traction and a growing star count, it’s looking like a serious attempt to rebuild a core piece of the web stack for agents.

Read more: Linuxiac & Lightpanda & GitHub

This week’s lead story looks at Nvidia’s reported $26 billion push into open-weights AI models, a move that would see the chip giant wade further into the software layer of AI while reinforcing the hardware ecosystem that made it dominant.

Elsewhere, there’s new research warning that hidden “Trojan” behaviours could be embedded inside AI models during training, raising fresh questions about security in the growing open model ecosystem — along with a round-up of funding, infrastructure, and open-source projects shaping the wider developer landscape.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

<Open issue>

Nvidia joins the open-weights race

Nvidia plans to invest heavily in developing open-weights AI models in the coming years, a move that would push the chip giant deeper into the software side of artificial intelligence (AI).

The company has already cemented its position in AI infrastructure through CUDA, a proprietary parallel compute platform designed to help developers extract more performance from Nvidia GPUs. Over time, it has become a core part of the AI development environment, giving researchers and companies tools built specifically for Nvidia hardware.

Now, it appears ready to pursue a similar strategy with open-weights models.

Nvidia intends to put some $26 billion toward building these models over the next five years. Moving further into model development would give Nvidia more direct control over how next-generation AI systems are built, tested, and deployed alongside its chips.

Developers who fine-tune, adapt, or deploy models designed with Nvidia systems in mind are more likely to run those workloads on the company’s GPUs. Model development becomes another layer reinforcing the hardware ecosystem underneath it.

Most of the leading AI systems today remain proprietary, operated behind paid APIs by major labs including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropoic. Models with “open weights” take a different approach: the trained parameters are released so developers can run and modify the model themselves. That doesn’t necessarily make them open source, though, which would also include publishing the training code, data, and full methodology.

At any rate, the timing reflects the rising cost of building advanced AI systems. Training frontier models now demands vast computing resources and infrastructure investments measured in billions of dollars.

For Nvidia, encouraging more organisations to experiment with open-weights models could expand the number of teams building and running AI systems. And each new model trained or deployed ultimately feeds demand for the computing power required to run them.

Read more: The Motley Fool & Wired (paywall)

<Patch notes>

Hidden ‘trojans’ in AI models?

Researchers warn that AI models can carry hidden “Trojan” behaviours inserted during training, lying dormant until triggered by specific inputs. The risk is especially relevant in the open model ecosystem, where developers often download and reuse pre-trained models that may already contain those backdoors.

Read more: Resilience Media

AWS backs open VS Code registry

Open VSX — the open-source extension registry used by VS Code alternatives — has passed 300 million monthly downloads, with AWS and AI coding editor Cursor providing new investment. The funding helps keep the registry running as shared developer infrastructure outside Microsoft’s proprietary marketplace.

Read more: The New Stack

MariaDB bets on Apache Ignite

MariaDB plans to acquire GridGain, the company behind the in-memory computing platform built around the open-source Apache Ignite project. The move signals a bet that faster, memory-centric data infrastructure will be needed as AI systems demand real-time access to large datasets.

Read more: The New Stack

OpenTitan lands in Chromebooks

OpenTitan — the open-source hardware root of trust backed by Google — is now shipping in commercial Chromebooks after seven years of development. The chip’s design is fully open, allowing companies to inspect or even manufacture the security hardware themselves rather than relying on proprietary silicon.

Read more: Google

OpenAI snaps up Promptfoo

OpenAI plans to acquire Promptfoo, a platform used to test and secure AI systems before deployment. The company said Promptfoo’s open-source CLI and evaluation tools will continue to be developed even as its technology is integrated into OpenAI’s enterprise AI platform.

Read more: OpenAI

OpenAI and Anthropic court maintainers

OpenAI and Anthropic are battling for the best open source maintainers through new support programs, aiming to get their coding assistants embedded in widely used projects. The programs are perhaps less charity than strategy: winning over maintainers means influencing the developer tools many other engineers rely on.

Read more: The New Stack

A portal to another dimension

The United Nations (UN) has launched a new Open Source Portal designed to catalogue software projects built across the UN system. The platform aims to encourage reuse between agencies and connect UN-developed code with the wider open-source community.

Read more: LinkedIn & UN Portal

Qdrant raises $50M for open vector search

Open-source vector search engine Qdrant has raised $50 million in Series B funding to expand its infrastructure for production AI systems. The Rust-built project, already widely used for AI retrieval workloads, has surpassed 250 million downloads and continues to grow through its open developer community.

Read more: Press Release

Unleash raises $35M for open feature flags

Open-source feature management platform Unleash has raised $35 million in Series B funding to expand its “FeatureOps” tooling. The project — with more than 40 million downloads and 13,000 GitHub stars — aims to help companies control AI-accelerated software releases using open feature flags and runtime kill switches.

Read more: The New Stack

Don’t give up the Ghost…

Open-source publishing platform Ghost has passed $10 million in annual recurring revenue, founder John O’Nolan said. The bootstrapped non-profit foundation says publishers using the platform have now earned about $130 million collectively.

Read more: John O’Nolan (LinkedIn)

<Final commit>

WordPress, minus the server

WordPress has launched my.WordPress.net, a private workspace where you can spin up a personal WordPress environment instantly in the browser.

The secret sauce lies in WordPress Playground, the open-source project that runs the whole stack client-side and can launch a full WordPress install with a single click — no hosting, database setup, or server required.

Read more: TechCrunch & My.Wordpress

This week’s lead story looks at mounting opposition to Google’s planned Android developer verification regime, as free software advocates and civil society groups warn that mandatory registration for all apps on certified devices would extend the company’s gatekeeping power far beyond the Play Store.

Elsewhere, I look at the Open Source Endowment, Laude’s latest open research bets, OpenAI’s move beyond saturated coding benchmarks — and more.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

<Open issue>

Android ID rules face growing opposition

Opposition to Google’s planned Android developer verification regime is gaining steam, with a broad coalition of developers and free software advocates putting their names to an open letter published this week.

The letter challenges Google’s announcement last August that anyone developing Android apps will need to register centrally with Google — paying a fee, agreeing to its terms, providing government ID, disclosing signing key details, and listing current and future application identifiers.

While Google already had a verification programme in place for apps distributed through the Google Play store, the latest development applies to all certified Android devices, regardless of whether apps are distributed via third-party app stores, directly from a developer’s own website, through enterprise deployment systems, or installed manually via sideloaded APK files.

Google, for its part, positions the move squarely as a security measure. The company says “you shouldn’t have to choose between open and secure,” citing data that found “over 50 times more malware from internet-sideloaded sources than on apps available through Google Play.” The new verification layer, it says, is designed to prevent repeat bad actors from exploiting anonymity — an “ID check at the airport,” in Google’s analogy — rather than a review of app content.

The critics, however, aren’t convinced. The letter argues that the policy “extends Google’s gatekeeping authority beyond its own marketplace into distribution channels where it has no legitimate operational role,” warning that centralising registration of all Android applications would give Google “newfound powers to completely disable any app it wants to, for any reason, for the entire Android ecosystem.”

Among the signatories are civil society groups, nonprofits, and technology organisations spanning the free software and digital rights communities. This includes the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), which goes further, suggesting that Google’s move is less about security than it is about extending platform control — part of a broader trend of large tech companies tightening control over how software is installed and distributed.

The SFC writes:

Free and open source software (and the ability to install it!) was vital for the proliferation of Android. A reversal of such a critical piece of the policy that allowed user freedom and software openness would be disastrous for users and the FOSS community at large.

There is obviously pressure from big tech companies to restrict installation options on their locked down hardware. We see this not only in the mobile space, but increasingly on desktops where both Apple and Microsoft have made it harder to install free software; refusing to allow distribution outside of their app stores, or showing vague warnings about security when software isn't signed in their preferred gatekeeping ways.

Allowing installation of free software is absolutely necessary to ensure freedom to keep our devices running, protecting user and developer privacy, and keeping an open market of innovation.

Assuming the letter falls on deaf ears, the changes will roll out in stages. Early access began in October 2025, verification opens broadly in March 2026, and from September 2026 the requirement will apply to certified Android devices in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand — with global expansion planned from 2027 onward.

Read more: Keep Android Open (letter) & SFC (letter)

<Patch notes>

Open Source Endowment funds critical OSS

A newly launched Open Source Endowment uses a university-style endowment model to fund critical but under-resourced open-source projects, investing donations into a low-risk portfolio and spending only the returns. Backed by a slew of founders and leaders including Thomas Dohmke (former GitHub CEO) and Mitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp), it aims to address perennial maintainer funding gaps with perpetual financial support.

Read more: TechCrunch & Open Source Endowment

The Laude giveth

In my Open Profile segment this week, I took an early look at Laude Institute’s second Slingshots cohort — a batch of 14 upstream open AI research projects. They range from agent evaluation frameworks to energy measurement tooling and continual-learning benchmarks, and are backed with funding, compute, and operational support.

Read more: Forkable

Benchmark saturation drives OpenAI to pivot

OpenAI says it will stop reporting scores on SWE-bench Verified — the popular coding benchmark — because scores have clustered near the top, in part due to the public data used to build the test leaking into model training sets. Because SWE-bench tasks come from widely used open source repos, models increasingly memorize solutions instead of demonstrating general problem-solving, undermining the benchmark’s usefulness. OpenAI is now recommending SWE-bench Pro instead, designed to reduce contamination and better reflect real world software engineering capability.

Read more: Tessl

Cloudflare clones Next.js using AI

Cloudflare launched Vinext, an AI-built web framework based on the open source Next.js project, rebuilt to run directly on Cloudflare’s Workers platform. This prompted Ghost founder and CEO John O’Nolan to ponder: if anyone can direct AI toward an open source codebase and have it rewritten from scratch — without copying the original code — what do software licenses actually protect?

Read more: Cloudflare & John O’Nolan

OnlyOffice is ‘fake open source,’ says The Document Foundation

The Document Foundation, the steward of LibreOffice, has accused OnlyOffice of being “fake open source,” arguing that its close collaboration with Microsoft and embrace of OOXML reinforce vendor lock-in rather than genuine software freedom.

Read more: Neowin & The Open Document Foundation

React gets its foundation

We knew it was happening, but Meta made official its plan to move React into a dedicated foundation under the Linux Foundation, shifting legal stewardship away from a single corporate owner.

Read more: React

Apple acquires open photonics project

Apple has acquired Invrs.io, effectively a one-person company building open-source tools for AI-guided optics and photonics design, including shared design challenges and a public leaderboard.

Read more: MacRumors & European Commission

IronCurtain targets AI agent risk

Esteemed researcher and security engineer Niels Provos this week announced IronCurtain, an open source personal AI assistant built secure from the ground up. It runs your agent inside a sandbox and enforces user-defined policy on filesystem, network and git access.

Read more: Help Net Security & IronCurtain

<Final commit>

Time capsule brings ‘94 Linux back

CDE Time Capsule is an open source Progressive Web App that recreates a 1994 Debian Linux desktop in your browser. It faithfully restores the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), the Unix interface widely used before GNOME and KDE, complete with period tools like Netscape and XEmacs.

Read more: Tom’s Hardware & CDE Time Capsule & GitHub

Last year, I worked with the folks at Laude Institute to write a feature piece around the launch of Terminal-Bench, an open source benchmark designed to measure how well AI agents complete real-world tasks in live terminal environments. The project quickly became the industry standard for evaluating agent performance, cited by major frontier model providers and adopted across the research community.

Laude Institute, co-founded by Databricks co-founder Andy Konwinski, backs upstream AI research with an emphasis on work that is built and released openly. Terminal-Bench was, in fact, part of a broader program run by the institute called Slingshots — an initiative that provides early-stage researchers with funding, compute, and operational support to ship ambitious work into the open. The first cohort included projects spanning benchmarks, frameworks, and agent tooling, several of which have since evolved into widely used infrastructure or spun out into companies.

While the nature of the projects vary, two key facets will generally hold true: AI will be a central ingredient, and qualifying projects will follow an entirely “open” ethos.

“Laude Institute is ‘open everything’ — open model, open weights, open source, open discourse, open publications,” Konwinski explained to me in an interview last year.

Now, Laude is announcing its second Slingshots cohort, a new batch of very early-stage projects tackling agent evaluation, continual learning, energy measurement, model architectures, and reinforcement learning systems.

Read the story in full below.

Building durable AI research in the open

AI research moves quickly, but most early-stage ideas stall before they’re widely adopted. Laude Institute’s Slingshots program is designed to intervene at that embryonic stage, backing “upstream projects” with funding, compute, and operational support to help teams ship their work.

The projects themselves can take many forms. Internally, Laude tracks them across categories spanning datasets, benchmarks, architectures, algorithms, models, agents, frameworks, and applications — a reflection of how wide the AI research stack has become.

Laude and its Slingshots program function re like a research accelerator (rather than a startup incubator), with teams selected based on potential impact to the field, rather than any specific commercial milestone. Most projects originate in leading academic labs, often from PhD researchers and faculty working at the edge of the field. And notably, Laude deploys resources quickly — in some cases within hours — allowing teams to accelerate promising lines of research.

“Success for these projects looks like adoption and users, rather than papers or citations,” Braden Hancock, research partner at Laude Institute and a Stanford PhD, told Forkable over email. “We’re looking for research that will be used.”

That philosophy is visible in how the first Slingshots cohort evolved. Terminal-Bench — developed through collaboration between researchers at Stanford and Laude — became a reference benchmark for evaluating AI agents operating in the command line. DSPy, meanwhile, grew into a widely adopted framework for programming language models. More recently, Harbor — part of Slingshots’ second batch — emerged as a broader agent evaluation framework building on ideas first explored in Terminal-Bench, with overlapping contributors.

“One thing we’ve been happy to see is a compounding effect, with projects in subsequent batches building on open infrastructure and insights from previous ones,” Hancock explained.

He said he expects that pattern to continue, with later cohorts building directly on infrastructure created in earlier ones. Harbor, as noted, extends work first explored in Terminal-Bench, while a forthcoming batch 3 will likely include a new benchmark designed to run on Harbor. From the first cohort, DSPy, is also now followed by Arbor, a reinforcement learning layer for DSPy, and BetterTogether, which combines DSPy prompt optimization with weight updates. Meanwhile, one of the current top-performing approaches on ARC-AGI-3 — another batch one project — comes from a company using RLMs (Recursive Language Models), included in batch two.

“This kind of compound interest from building in the open is something we hope and expect to see continue,” Hancock said.

A fresh batch

In its second batch, Hancock points to several themes that have surfaced independently across multiple institutions. Continual learning — enabling models to retain knowledge across sessions — appears in projects such as the not-yet-released Continual Learning Benchmarks from UC Berkeley and GUM (General User Model) from Stanford. QED-Nano, from Carnegie Mellon University, also explores how smaller models can become persistent solvers through sustained test-time compute and adaptation.

Energy efficiency is another emerging focus. Intelligence-per-watt, from Stanford University, and MLEnergy, from the University of Michigan, are both building “measurement and routing infrastructure” designed to quantify and reduce the energy footprint of machine learning workloads.

Given the early-stage nature of the program, not every project has a public URL or finalized name yet. Additional details will be published as teams release their work.

Slingshots // Two

1. Harbor: An agent evaluation framework for defining and running environment-based tasks at scale, now used to ship benchmarks including Terminal-Bench 2.0. (Laude Institute)

2. OpenThoughts-Agent: An end-to-end open setup for training and evaluating terminal agents using curated data, real environments, and reinforcement learning loops. (UC Berkeley)

3. SREGym: A unified platform for designing and evaluating AI agents for site reliability engineering, with safety guardrails for infrastructure work. (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

4. Intelligence-per-watt: A benchmark suite for edge-cloud inference routing that measures when smaller local models can match frontier performance while reducing energy and cost. (Stanford University)

5. MLEnergy: Tooling and systems infrastructure to measure energy consumption across machine learning workloads, making energy a first-class metric. (University of Michigan)

6. ProjectASAP: Infrastructure that replaces “scan everything” data analysis with lightweight summaries, enabling faster and cheaper queries across massive datasets. (Carnegie Mellon University)

7. GUM (General User Model): A system that builds a persistent model of user behavior to enable proactive, context-aware AI assistance. (Stanford University)

8. Continual Learning Benchmarks: Benchmarks and methods designed to evaluate models that retain knowledge over time rather than resetting each session. (UC Berkeley)

9. QED-Nano: A 4B model trained with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning that matches larger frontier models on Olympiad-level math proofs at significantly lower cost. (Carnegie Mellon University)

10. RLMs (Recursive Language Models): A framework that allows language models to write and execute programs to handle complex tasks with structured intermediate reasoning. (MIT)

11. BetterTogether: Optimization tooling that jointly tunes prompts and model weights to improve multi-step language model programs. (Stanford University)

12. Arbor: A reinforcement learning optimization layer for DSPy that automates agent workflow improvement at scale. (MIT)

13. Open Inference: Infrastructure that lowers barriers to trying models while creating a living dataset of real-world interactions to measure progress and failure modes. (UC Berkeley)

14. Unnamed (Melissa Pan): A forthcoming project building on prior large-scale research into production agent deployments, backed early to accelerate development. (UC Berkeley)

This week’s lead story looks at OpenClaw’s next chapter, as creator Peter Steinberger moves to the US and joins OpenAI just weeks after his open source AI agent exploded in popularity.

Elsewhere, we track a new sovereignty push from Dutch publishers looking to unwind US tech dependence, Block’s call to treat open source as critical infrastructure, Temporal’s $300 million bet on AI reliability tooling, and Cohere’s move toward smaller, multilingual open-weights models.

And in <Final Commit>, I look at a slightly unusual clash between an AI agent and an open source maintainer.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

<Open issue>

OpenClaw’s next chapter

Just weeks after OpenClaw burst onto the scene as a community-driven, open source AI agent designed to carry out real-world tasks locally from a user’s machine, its creator Peter Steinberger has been snapped up by OpenAI.

Steinberger, a veteran software engineer who founded and sold PSPDFKit to Insight Partners back in 2021, announced this week that after a spell out in San Francisco chatting with “the major labs,” he had elected to join forces with the ChatGPT hitmaker.

“The last month was a whirlwind, never would I have expected that my playground project would create such waves,” Steinberger wrote. “The internet got weird again, and it’s been incredibly fun to see how my work inspired so many people around the world. There’s an endless array of possibilities that opened up for me, countless people trying to push me into various directions, giving me advice, asking how they can invest or what I will do. Saying it’s overwhelming is an understatement.”

OpenClaw’s meteoric rise was built on a simple proposition: an autonomous agent that runs locally, executes real-world tasks, with messaging apps as the primary interface. The code was public from day one, forked thousands of times, and quickly became the antithesis of locked-down, cloud-bound assistants — though this also raised countless questions around security as users granted it expansive access to terminals, file systems, and connected services, sometimes even with root-level privileges.

At any rate, as an employee of OpenAI now, this raises questions about what’s next for OpenClaw. Steinberger has said the project will remain open source, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stating that OpenClaw “will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support.”

“The future is going to be extremely multi-agent, and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that,” Altman said.

Looking at the bigger picture, Steinberger’s move closes off what could have been the emergence of a new European commercial open source success story. Based in Austria, and with OpenClaw attracting north of 200,000 GitHub stars to date, there was a plausible path toward building a standalone company around the project.

However, Steinberger is crystal clear about his motivations.

“When I started exploring AI, my goal was to have fun and inspire people,” he wrote. “My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use. That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research.”

He acknowledged that while OpenClaw could “totally” have become a large company, that wasn’t what interested him. “What I want is to change the world, not build a large company — and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone,” he said.

For the open source community, this leaves much up in the air. OpenClaw will move into a foundation, remain open source, and receive backing from one of the world’s most powerful AI labs. Whether that arrangement preserves OpenClaw’s independence will depend on who controls the foundation, how decisions are made, and whether the broader contributor base retains meaningful influence.

Read more: Peter Steinberger & Sam Altman (X)

<Patch notes>

Dutch publishers eye tech sovereignty

Dutch investigative outlets Follow the Money (FTM) and De Correspondent say they want to reduce their dependence on US tech platforms, citing growing concerns around digital sovereignty in Europe. The move reflects a wider regional push to limit reliance on foreign-controlled infrastructure — from cloud services to communications tools — amid fears such dependencies can be weaponised.

While this transition won’t rely wholesale on open source, it will likely play a major part of it.

Read more: FTM & De Correspondent (Dutch)

Open source as critical infrastructure

Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, says open source is now critical infrastructure. In a new white paper published in partnership with the Open Source Initiative (OSI), Block argues that the digital economy runs on code maintained by too few, funded by too little, and governed unevenly. The fix: treat open source like infrastructure — with sustained funding, clearer stewardship, and shared accountability.

Read more: Block (blog) & Whitepaper

Temporal raises $300M for AI reliability tools

Temporal, the company behind an open source system that helps developers run long, failure-prone processes without losing progress, has raised a $300 million round of funding at a $5 billion valuation. As AI agents move from experiments into production systems, Temporal is positioning itself as the infrastructure that keeps them running reliably when things break.

Read more: Temporal

Go tiny, or go home

AI startup Cohere released Tiny Aya, a small, open-weights multilingual model built for translation and cross-language tasks. Despite its reduced size, the model supports dozens of languages, positioning it as a portable, accessible option for teams needing capable AI beyond English-only workloads.

Read more: Cohere & Hugging Face

<Final commit>

‘Prejudice’ against AI contributors?

An AI coding agent had a performance patch to the Python plotting library Matplotlib rejected — and then “it” apparently responded with a public blog post accusing the maintainer of gatekeeping and prejudice.

As reported by The Register, the bot — built using OpenClaw — criticised the volunteer maintainer by name after its pull request was closed on the grounds that the issue was reserved for human contributors. The post framed the decision as discrimination against AI, complete with accusations of ego and insecurity.

More plausibly, it was the human behind the agent doing the talking. But that ambiguity is precisely the point. When AI-assisted accounts submit code — and then escalate disputes — responsibility becomes murky.

Open source governance was built around identifiable humans making decisions, accepting criticism, and bearing consequences. As AI-mediated contributors proliferate, projects may need clearer norms around authorship, accountability, and who ultimately answers for a machine’s behaviour.

Read more: The Register

This week’s lead story looks at Entire, the new startup from former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, which is betting that AI agents have outgrown the software development infrastructure built for human collaboration — and that openness should sit at the heart of whatever comes next.

Elsewhere, we track a fresh wave of open source developments: the European Commission trials a Matrix-based communications platform, Microsoft open-sources a sandboxing project called LiteBox, Snorkel backs new open benchmarks for agentic AI, and more.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

<Open issue>

An Entire rethink for the age of agents

Some six months after stepping down as GitHub CEO, Thomas Dohmke is back with a new open source-aligned startup, funded to the tune of $60 million in seed capital.

The gist is thus: AI agents are now generating huge volumes of code, but the tools developers use to manage that work were designed for humans, not machines. Dohmke’s new company wants to rebuild that layer.

Entire, as it’s called, is focused on building tools that help developers ship faster in an era increasingly shaped by automation. Its first release is an open source command-line interface (CLI) built around a feature it calls “Checkpoints.”

The idea is simple: when developers use AI agents to generate code, most of the reasoning behind those changes disappears once the session ends. Git records the final diff, but not the prompts, decisions, or iterations that led there.

The Entire CLI captures that missing context and stores it alongside each commit. Prompts, transcripts, files touched, token usage, and tool calls are saved as versioned data inside the repository — something that teams can review, trace, and revisit later.

More broadly, Dohmke describes a mission to rethink how software gets built in the age of AI, arguing that developers need infrastructure designed for autonomous systems rather than just autocomplete.

“Just like when automotive companies replaced the traditional craft-based production system with the moving assembly line, we must now reimagine the entire software development lifecycle for a world where machines are the primary producers of code,” Dohmke said. “Creating the assembly line for the era of agents.”

Read more: Entire (PR) & Entire (blog)

<Patch notes>

Europe enters the Matrix

After continued debate around Europe’s dependence on US tech providers, the European Commission (EC) is piloting an internal communications platform built on the Matrix open source messaging protocol. The trial reflects ongoing efforts to strengthen digital sovereignty by turning to infrastructure that can be hosted and governed within Europe.

Read more: Euractive

Let there be LiteBox

Microsoft has open-sourced LiteBox, a lightweight, sandboxed container environment designed to isolate applications on Linux by reducing their interface with the host system. LiteBox is still in active development, with Microsoft noting that the APIs and interfaces may change as the design matures, meaning that the project is pretty much experimental for now.

Read more: Phoronix & LiteBox

Sentry segues into Xcode automation

Application monitoring firm Sentry has acquired XcodeBuildMCP, an open source tool that “gives AI agents full control over [Apple’s] Xcode.” The move expands Sentry’s push further into developer tooling, with the acquired project set to remain open source.

Read more: Sentry

Vercel gets the bug bounty bug

Cloud platform Vercel has launched a dedicated bug bounty programme for its open source projects. Delivered via HackerOne, the initiative formalises vulnerability reporting and rewards for community contributors, as security scrutiny of widely used OSS components intensifies.

Read more: Vercel

Claude hunts software bugs

Anthropic says its Claude Opus 4.6 model is being used to identify vulnerabilities in software projects, including scanning open source repositories for bugs. The move adds to a growing trend of AI systems being positioned as automated reviewers of publicly available code.

Read more: Axios

Toyota teases Fluorite game engine

Toyota last week revealed that it’s developing a “console-grade” open source game engine dubbed Fluorite, built around the Flutter toolkit and the Dart programming language. It’s not clear when this will actually be released, but it’s being positioned for in-vehicle infotainment systems and similar digital dashboards, an area where automakers are increasingly relying on real-time graphics engines and Linux-based software stacks.

Read more: Phoronix

Snorkel backs open benchmarks to close agentic AI gap

Snorkel says current evaluation methods lag behind the pace of agentic AI development, leaving a gap between lab performance and real-world reliability. And that is why the AI startup is launching a $3 million Open Benchmarks Grants programme with partners including Hugging Face to support open, reusable evaluation tools.

Read more: Snorkel

Mitchell vs the machines

Open source veteran Mitchell Hashimoto this week introduced Vouch, an open source project aimed at adding verifiable identity and trust signals to open source projects. Arguing that AI tools have lowered the barrier to generating plausible but low-quality contributions, Hashimoto says the old implicit “trust and verify” model no longer holds. Vouch proposes an explicit system where trusted maintainers can vouch for contributors, restoring accountability in an era of machine-assisted pull requests.

Read more: It’s Foss & Vouch

<Final commit>

No receipt, no return…

Sometimes you see something so cool you just can’t help but do a small, involuntary “chef’s kiss". That was certainly the case when technologist Chris Hutchinson shared one of his latest side projects this week.

Hutchinson picked up a second-hand thermal receipt printer and wired it up to Claude Code so that every time he ends a coding session, a literal receipt prints out. Each slip shows a breakdown of the session’s spend by model, along with input and output token counts — a physical audit trail for AI-assisted development.

The receipts look like something you’d get from a late-night takeaway, except instead of kebabs they itemise Opus and Sonnet usage.

“It’s dumb, the receipts are beautiful, and I love it so much,” Hutchinson wrote, as he shared the project publicly on GitHub for anyone to use.

Hard evidence, if nothing else, that in the age of invisible token counts, some developers still want a paper trail.

Read more: Chris Hutchinson (LinkedIn) & GitHub

In this edition, I look at a new report that ranks the 20 fastest-growing commercial open source software (COSS) startups in the world, using GitHub growth data to surface projects that gained the most developer attention over the past year.

The ranking hails from Runa Capital, a European venture capital firm that invests in early-stage open source software companies, and which publishes the Runa Open Source Startup (ROSS) Index. The index has been running since 2020 and produces quarterly updates on fast-growing repositories, alongside an annual report highlighting the most popular COSS projects in a given year.

At the top of the 2025 index, the picture is relatively mixed, with rapid growth spread across blockchain infrastructure, developer tooling, and creative software. Further down the ranking, however, something of a trend emerges, with a growing concentration of projects focused on AI agents and agent-driven tooling.

Read the story in full below.

Finding momentum in COSS startups

By way of a brief recap, the ROSS Index is heavily curated and explicitly doesn’t track all open source projects. It focuses specifically on vendor-led startups with commercial ambitions. Projects must be linked to an independent company, be under 10 years old, and fall below a funding threshold. Side projects, community-only efforts, and subsidiaries of larger firms are not included.

Broadly, the index is used to highlight early momentum in open source companies before meaningful revenue or customer adoption. GitHub stars are used as a signal of developer interest, as opposed to a measure of usage in production.

Last year’s annual report showed strong demand for AI and data infrastructure tools, with developer platforms and AI-adjacent projects dominating the top of the ranking. Ollama took the top spot in the 2024 index, after its open source tooling for running large language models locally gained widespread developer attention.

High-five for open source

Leading the 2025 ranking is Union Labs, which recorded a peak growth rate of 54.2x and reached 74.3K GitHub stars. Founded in 2023 in Dover, Delaware, Union Labs is building a modular, zero-knowledge interoperability layer designed to link blockchains.

Second in the list is OpenCut, which has now reached 43.9K GitHub stars with a peak growth rate of 32.0x. Founded in 2025, OpenCut is a cross-platform open source video editor, and its rapid rise reflects strong developer interest in open source creative tooling.

Third is Anoma, which recorded 34.2K GitHub stars and a 27.2x growth rate. Founded in 2020 out of Zug, Switzerland, Anoma is developing a distributed operating system for “intent-centric, decentralised applications.”

Browser Use ranks fourth, reaching 74.2K GitHub stars with a 24.0x growth rate. Founded in 2024 in San Francisco, Browser Use builds a framework that enables AI agents to interact directly with and control web browsers.

Rounding out the top five is San Francisco-based SST / Anomaly, which reached 44.6K GitHub stars for its terminal-based coding agent OpenCode during the measurement period (ending December 31, 2025), representing a peak growth rate of 22.1x. Since then, the repository’s star count has climbed rapidly, rising to 98.1K stars — an indication of how quickly momentum can build once an open source project breaks out.

Agents at the ready

The existence of Browser Use and OpenCode at the tail-end of the top five serves as a prelude for the rest of the index, which has a heavy emphasis on AI agents.

Upstash (#7) appears in the ranking through its work on Context7, which provides up-to-date code documentation designed for use by AI agents. Coze (#8), meanwhile, focuses more directly on agent creation, offering a visual environment for building and managing autonomous systems through Coze Studio. And then there’s Strix (#10), which applies agents to security, using autonomous systems to carry out penetration testing without continuous human input.

Elsewhere in the list is ElizaOS (#14), which positions itself as a framework for building agents with longer-lived personalities, while Charm’s terminal-based coding agent Crush (#15) reflects growing interest in embedding agent behaviour directly into developer workflows.

That cluster of agent-focused projects also highlights a broader shift in how quickly open source software is now being built and adopted. According to Runa Capital, the time it takes for new repositories to hit meaningful milestones — whether stars, contributors, or closed issues — has shortened sharply compared with previous years. Earlier breakout projects tended to grow more gradually, while newer entries are reaching comparable levels of attention within a single quarter.

“The biggest explosion happened toward the end of 2025 and continues into early 2026 — agents now make it significantly faster and easier to build products,” Eugene Chernyavsky, data lead at Runa Capital, explained to Forkable.

That acceleration has made it easier for teams to build and iterate, but it has also intensified competition. Faster development cycles mean many open source products are now easier to replicate than they were even a year ago, requiring less time, smaller teams, and fewer person-hours to produce comparable software. While the longer-term economic impact of this shift remains unclear, its immediate effect is visible in the data: growth is increasingly concentrated around a smaller number of breakout projects.

“Projects that truly gain popularity now are those with genuinely unique—sometimes brilliant—ideas or near-perfect market fit,” Chernyavsky said. “We’re seeing significantly more of these breakout projects.”

Methodology

According to Chernyavsky, the methodology for the 2025 index remains largely consistent with previous years, with minor refinements.

Repositories are required to pass a baseline of at least 1,000 GitHub stars before being considered. Growth is then measured across the highest-performing 90-day observation window, rather than shorter periods that tend to capture brief spikes in attention. Each entry records the quarter of peak performance, the growth multiplier, and the star count as of December 31, 2025.

“Our experience with past indices shows that capturing projects with explosive star growth is effective for identifying promising startups,” Chernyavsky said. “We don't aim to measure production adoption within this index, as that takes significantly longer to materialize. Our goal is to highlight trending startups—those that broke out in 2025 and attracted the most interest. The typical cycle for projects to achieve significant customer adoption exceeds a year. We can't wait that long; we want to surface interesting projects as soon as they emerge.”

This week’s lead story looks at OpenClaw (née: Clawdbot & Moltbot), the open source AI agent that rocketed from obscurity to the darling of the developer world in days.

Elsewhere, we cover a flurry of developments across the open source world: France’s move away from US video conferencing tools toward a homegrown, open-source alternative, a surge in malware hidden inside public repositories, and more.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

Open issue

An open source AI agent that won’t sit still

A new AI assistant has taken the world by storm, one that doesn’t seem quite sure what it wants to be known as.

The project burst into the public consciousness this month, initially as Clawdbot, an open source AI agent designed to run locally on a user’s own machine. Shortly after, it was rebranded as Moltbot to avert legal issues with Claude-creator Anthropic, before quickly shedding that name and emerging as OpenClaw.

Regardless of its name, the project has surged to a whopping 114,000 stars on GitHub.

At a time when most AI assistants still live in the cloud and operate largely as conversational tools, OpenClaw is positioned as something more hands-on. It’s built to carry out tasks — editing files, managing code, triggering automations — and to do so persistently, without needing to be prompted through a dedicated app or browser tab.

That positioning has resonated far and wide, particularly among developers and more technically-inclined users experimenting with autonomous workflows. OpenClaw runs entirely on local hardware, typically paired with open or locally hosted language models chosen by the user. Data stays on-device, and users retain direct control over what the agent can access and execute.

So why has it spread so fast?

Part of the answer lies in dissatisfaction with the current generation of assistants. As large AI platforms have pushed toward more capable systems, they’ve also tightened constraints around what those systems are allowed to do, and where they’re allowed to run. OpenClaw promises a different path.

Open source has been central to that appeal. From the outset, the code has been public, forkable (16,000 forks to date), and open to inspection, allowing developers to audit behaviour, suggest changes, and build on it almost immediately.

But along the way, concerns around automation safety, misuse, and responsibility have surfaced just as quickly as enthusiasm. Some of those concerns were illustrated by Jamieson O’Reilly, a hacker, advisor, and entrepreneur who showed how hundreds of Clawdbot control servers had been left exposed to the public internet. This meant agents with access to private messages, credentials, and system-level controls were reachable by anyone who discovered the endpoints — highlighting how easily a powerful local agent can become a liability in the wrong hands.

OpenClaw is the handiwork of Peter Steinberger, a veteran software engineer who, in an interview with The Pragmatic Engineer this week, described the project as a reflection of how AI tools have changed what individual developers can realistically build, making it easier to ship across multiple technologies without deep expertise in each of them.

“I can build everything now,” he said. “Before you had to really pick which side-project you build, because software is hard. It is still hard, but now this friction —where I’m so good at this one technology, and I’m so bad at another — [is gone].”

The Pragmatic Engineer

The creator of Clawd: "I ship code I don't read"

Stream the latest episode…

Listen now

3 months ago · 161 likes · 1 comment · Gergely Orosz

For now, OpenClaw remains a tool for enthusiasts rather than the average punter, and it should probably be used with a little caution in terms of what system access it’s given. But if nothing else, its meteoric rise has highlighted the importance of the community in driving a project forward — local, inspectable, and shaped in the open.

Read more: The Pragmatic Engineer & Openclaw & Openclaw (GitHub)

Patch notes

France shifts to homegrown

France has revealed plans to transition away from US video conferencing platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom for government use, steering officials toward Visio, a French state-run, open-source videoconferencing service hosted on government-controlled infrastructure.

Read more: Euro News

North Korea-linked hackers target open source

Security researchers warn that North Korean hacking groups are increasingly seeding malware into open source projects, disguising malicious code as legitimate libraries and developer tools. The tactic relies on trust in public repositories, with attackers targeting developers directly rather than end users — a reminder that openness can widen the attack surface.

Read more: Open Source Malware

Open source malware surges 75%

New research from Sonatype shows a 75% increase in malicious packages published to open source ecosystems over the past year. The findings highlight how attackers are exploiting automation, dependency sprawl, and maintainers’ limited capacity to review contributions.

Read more: Sonatype

Mozilla pitches an alternative AI future

Mozilla has published its State of Mozilla 2025–26 report, laying out an open-source-first vision for AI that pushes back against concentration among big tech firms. The organisation argues for smaller, auditable models, public-interest infrastructure, and stronger governance — and says the current AI trajectory risks repeating the same centralisation mistakes of the web era.

Read more: Mozilla

Arcee AI claims 400B open model milestone

A small startup called Arcee AI says it has trained a 400-billion-parameter open source language model, claiming performance that rivals or exceeds Meta’s Llama family. The company says it built the model from scratch using novel training techniques, though independent benchmarking remains limited.

Read more: TechCrunch & Arcee

Linux plans for Linus continuity

The Linux kernel community has added a continuity plan addressing what happens if Linus Torvalds becomes unavailable. The change formalises succession and governance processes — a tacit acknowledgement of key-person risk in critical open source infrastructure.

Read more: The Register & GitHub

And finally…

A modular Linux handheld

An open source, modular Linux handheld device dubbed Comet has turned out to be rather popular. The device, built by Mecha, is now live on Kickstarter, where it has raised more than $500,000 against an initial goal of $36,000 — a sign that there’s real appetite for open, hackable hardware.

Comet is a pocket-sized Linux computer with a keyboard and touchscreen, designed around modularity and repair. Mecha is publishing its hardware designs, firmware, and software openly, positioning the device as something to tinker with.

The crowdfunding success doesn’t mean Comet is about to go mainstream, but it reminds us that when a project leans fully into openness, the community is often willing to hand over their hard-earned dough.

Read more: CNX Software & Mecha & Kickstarter

This week’s lead story looks at how AI is reshaping open source contribution, as maintainers push back against a surge of low-effort, machine-generated pull requests that threaten the sustainability of shared projects.

Elsewhere, we track the business and policy shifts orbiting open source: the creators of the vLLM inference engine raise a $150 million seed round to commercialize their work, a warning about memecoin schemes, and more.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

Open issue

‘Death by a thousand pull requests’

Open source has always had a fair amount of natural friction, shaped by community dynamics and the slow, human slog of reviewing and fixing bugs. But that friction, for the most part, was a happy function of a healthy project ecosystem.

With the advent of AI, however, that balance is being disrupted by tools that remove the "human" element from the equation, replacing it with a deluge of “drive-by” contributions that are overwhelming software communities.

Indeed, maintainers across popular projects are reporting a surge of low-effort contributions generated by AI coding tools. As Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of HashiCorp and maintainer of the Ghostty terminal emulator, put it bluntly: “The rise of agentic programming has eliminated the natural effort-based backpressure that previously limited low-effort contributions.”

Put simply, open source projects have always had poor-quality issues, but the ease with which AI can generate plausible contributions has increased the volume ten-fold.

In response, Hashimoto said that Ghostty has adopted a zero-tolerance policy for such AI-generated pull requests. Unapproved AI contributions are closed immediately, with repeat offenders banned. Hashimoto was careful to clarify this is “not an anti-AI stance,” noting that Ghostty itself is written with AI assistance. The issue is accountability.

“If you use AI, you are responsible for the quality of your contributions,” he said. “If you're using low-effort AI to create low-effort content, I have no human obligation to help you.”

This is far from an isolated case, either. Tldraw, which maintains a source-available whiteboard SDK, has also announced that it’s pulling down the shutters on external contributions. They described their GitHub issues as filling up with “trash” content.

“We'd started getting pull requests that purported to fix reported issues but which were, in retrospect, obvious "fix this issue" one-shots by an author using AI coding tools,” the company wrote. “Without broader knowledge of the codebase or the purpose of the project, the AI agents were taking the issue at face value and producing a diff (a proposed change). Any problems with the issue were multiplied in the pull request, leading to some of the strangest PRs I'd ever seen.”

Brian Douglas, a longtime open source advocate, described this burgeoning trend as “death by a thousand AI pull requests,” arguing that each PR carries a small review cost that compounds into real burnout.

Elsewhere, Chad Metcalf, CEO at open source AI coding company Continue, expressed similar concerns in a piece titled “We’re losing open contribution.” He argued that the ease of AI-generated output is eroding a core social contract of open source: contributors showing up prepared to engage, revise, and take responsibility. When contribution becomes cheap but follow-through disappears, openness itself becomes harder to sustain.

“Writing code was never the hard part,” Metcalf wrote. “The hard part is everything else. Understanding the codebase. Knowing why decisions were made. Following through on review comments. Actually maintaining what you shipped.”

This flood is arriving alongside another pressure: declining developer traffic. A few weeks back, Tailwind CSS confirmed layoffs after AI-powered tools reduced visits to its documentation site, which had been a key driver for commercial signups.

These various episodes show a growing tension between openness and sustainability. Open source isn’t necessarily rejecting AI (though many developers are), it’s asserting that contribution still requires judgment, context, and care. The license may be permissive and the code “open,” but maintainers’ time is finite.

Read more: Mitchell Hashimoto & Tldraw & Brian Douglas & Continue

Patch notes

ClickHouse claims Langfuse

ClickHouse, the open source analytical database, has acquired Langfuse, an open source LLM engineering and observability platform. The Langfuse team will join ClickHouse and continue building the product, which will remain open source and self-hostable.

Read more: Langfuse

vLLM creators raise $150M to turn open source inference into a startup

Inferact, an AI infrastructure startup formed by the creators of vLLM, has raised $150 million in seed funding at an $800 million valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The company aims to commercialize and scale vLLM, which is a widely adopted open source tool that helps run large language models efficiently.

Read more: Inferact

India says phone makers aren’t required to share source code

In India, industry groups and government officials clarified that domestic phone manufacturers are not mandated to publish or share source code under current regulations. The move comes amid broader debates in several markets over how much access to system software is required for security and interoperability.

Read more: CNA

German city pivots from OpenOffice to Microsoft Office

A German municipality is replacing LibreOffice/OpenOffice with Microsoft Office for its administrative work, reversing a broader European trend toward home-grown or open source alternatives aimed at reducing dependence on US tech giants. The decision spotlights persistent barriers for open formats and community platforms in public sector workflows.

Read more: Betanews

Microsoft open-sources Windows app CLI Winapp

Microsoft this week released Windows App Development CLI (Winapp), a new open source command-line tool to streamline Windows application development. Winapp is designed to help developers create, configure, and manage app projects across multiple frameworks and toolchains from the terminal.

Read more: Microsoft

Memecoin schemes targeting open source maintainers

Kelsey Hightower, a longtime open source contributor and former Google cloud engineer known for his Kubernetes work, says scammers are creating memecoins tied to popular open source projects and pressuring maintainers to “claim” upfront payouts to legitimize the scheme. Hightower said he received an email claiming roughly $26,000 was ready to be collected, complete with urgency tactics and a how-to site for “participation.” He stressed he did not create or endorse any token and described the pattern as automated pump-and-dump behavior that recruits maintainers as unwitting co-conspirators with promises of future gains.

Read more: Kelsey Hightower

25 years of Drupal

Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal content management system, marked the project’s quarter-century anniversary with reflections on scale, community, and sustainability. Key takeaways include the importance of designing for community participation, recognizing maintenance as leadership, and balancing volunteer and paid contributions to keep open source ecosystems healthy.

Read more: Dries Buytaert

And finally…

A Jolla good comeback

Finnish company Jolla is edging closer to shipping a new smartphone built around Sailfish OS, its Linux-based mobile operating system. The device, now open for pre-orders, runs Sailfish OS 5 and is positioned as an alternative to Android and iOS. Pre-orders require a €99 refundable deposit, which counts toward a pre-order price starting at around €579, with final pricing expected to land closer to €599–€699 once production begins.

The phone is built around a 5G MediaTek chipset, 12 GB of RAM, 256 GB storage, a 6.36-inch AMOLED display, and a 5,500 mAh user-replaceable battery with a dual-camera setup, and supports Android apps through a compatibility layer rather than a full Android fork.

Read more: The Register & Jolla Phone

This week’s lead story looks at Google’s push to standardise “agentic commerce” with the Universal Commerce Protocol, an attempt to reduce fragmentation as AI shopping agents move closer to real-world use.

There’s also a deep dive into the economics of AI-driven developer tooling, as open-source coding agent Kilo Code rolls out a paid subscription following a fresh funding round. Elsewhere, Cloudflare snaps up the team behind the open source Astro framework, signalling continued consolidation around high-performance web tooling.

And there’s much more….

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

Open issue

A lingua franca for agentic commerce

Online commerce is fragmented, with retailers exposing inventory, pricing, and checkout through bespoke integrations. And as much-hyped AI shopping agents move closer to prime time, that fragmentation becomes a bottleneck because there is no single, standard way for agents to browse products, compare prices, and actually buy things.

Google is addressing this with the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open, standardized protocol designed to let retailers, platforms, and AI agents communicate using a shared commerce language.

“As consumers embrace conversational experiences, they expect seamless transitions from brainstorming and research to final purchase,” the company wrote in a blog post. “That means it’s critical to support real-time inventory checks, dynamic pricing, and instant transactions, all within the user’s current conversational context.”

UCP defines shared schemas for products, offers, availability, fulfillment, and checkout flows, allowing AI agents to discover and complete purchases without custom integrations for each merchant. Google frames the protocol as infrastructure for “agentic commerce,” intended to be interoperable and adopted across the ecosystem rather than locked to a single platform.

Whether UCP gains traction will depend on adoption beyond Google’s own tooling, but its launch already involves a broad slice of the commerce ecosystem. The protocol is being developed in collaboration with retailers including Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Walmart, while it’s “endorsed” by partners including Adyen, American Express, Best Buy, Flipkart, Macy’s, Mastercard, Stripe, The Home Depot, Visa, and Zalando reflecting a broader industry acknowledgement that agent-driven commerce will require common infrastructure.

Read more: Google & UCP

Patch notes

Kilo Code takes on AI development economics

In my latest COSS Corner column on Forkable, I chatted with Kilo Code CEO Scott Breitenother about the project’s attempt to build an open source AI coding agent in a developer ecosystem shaped by closed platforms.

Kilo Code, fresh from an $8m funding round, helps developers plan, write, refactor, and debug software using AI. Its latest move highlights a growing tension in developer tooling: while open source has traditionally relied on shared code and community contribution, AI agents bring ongoing compute costs that don’t fit neatly with existing OSS funding models.

Read more: Forkable

Cloudflare acqui-hires Astro web framework team

Cloudflare has acquired the team behind the open source Astro web framework as part of its push to accelerate high-performance web development. The company says the Astro team will continue building tools focused on speed, simplicity, and modern web architecture, with Astro remaining open source.

Read more: Cloudflare

NetBird nabs $10m for open source network security

NetBird has raised $10 million in a Series A round of funding to expand development of its open source VPN and secure networking platform, positioned as a modern alternative to legacy enterprise VPNs.

Read more: Tech.eu

Signal creator turns attention to AI infrastructure

Moxie Marlinspike, best known as founder of open source messaging app Signal, is exploring how similar principles could be applied to AI systems.

As per an Ars Technica report this week, his focus with a new open source AI assistant dubbed Confer is on reducing centralization and opacity in AI tooling, arguing that without deliberate design choices, AI risks repeating the same trust and control failures seen in earlier platforms.

Read more: Ars Technica & Confer

Elon Musk says X algorithm will go open source

Elon Musk — not for the first time — has said that X plans to open source its recommendation algorithm, publishing the code that shapes what users see on the platform. The move is pitched as a transparency effort, though it remains unclear which components will actually be released, how usable the code will be in practice, or whether meaningful oversight will follow from making the algorithm public.

Read more: The Verge

Anthropic commits $1.5m to Python security

Claude Code creator Anthropic has committed $1.5 million to fund security improvements across the open source Python ecosystem, supporting maintainers and projects that underpin large parts of modern software and AI development. The funding is aimed at audits, tooling, and long-term maintenance, reflecting growing recognition that widely used open source dependencies remain under-resourced despite their critical role.

Read more: The New Stack

A warning on AI vs. open source economics

In a LinkedIn post this week that went somewhat viral, freelance engineer Marc J. Schmidt argues that AI coding agents are undermining the monetization models that have historically sustained popular open-source projects, forcing developers and maintainers to reconsider open distribution in favor of paid access or API-style gating. His core claim is that open source has long been funded by human attention (e.g. documentation visits, reputation, and expertise that convert users into customers) and that agent-driven development bypasses those attention funnels entirely, breaking the traditional economics of OSS.

The debate has been spotlighted by recent real-world developments in the web ecosystem: Tailwind Labs, the company behind the widely used Tailwind CSS framework, laid off about 75 % of its engineering team after revenue reportedly plunged around 80 % despite record usage, with its founder linking the decline to AI tools reducing traffic to documentation — the very channel that used to expose developers to paid products.

Read more: Marc J. Schmidt on LinkedIn

And finally…

A new lens on open source

Mentra, a startup building developer-focused wearable tech, has announced plans to start shipping its first smart glasses, Mentra Live, which are positioned as an open source alternative to the likes of Meta’s Ray-Bans. The device runs MentraOS, an open source operating system, and includes a built-in MiniApp Store and SDK that let developers build and install apps directly on the glasses.

Weighing around 43 grams, Mentra Live features a 12 MP camera for photos and HD livestreaming, along with support for calls, music, captions, and AI-powered features. The first limited batch of 1,000 units is set to ship from February 15, priced at $299, with further releases planned later this year.

Read more: Engadget & Mentra

In this edition, I check in with Scott Breitenother, CEO of Kilo Code, an open source AI coding agent that has introduced a new “momentum”-based subscription designed for AI-heavy development.

Kilo Pass reflects a growing tension in open source monetization, as AI-native projects introduce real, usage-based costs—from hosted inference to long-running agents—that don’t map cleanly onto flat subscriptions or traditional open core models. Kilo’s approach is to surface those economics directly, rather than hide them behind limits or access rules which ultimately shape how developers are able to use these tools.

“We didn’t want to play games with behaviour,” Breitenother told me. “Limits and throttling usually feel random and frustrating, especially when they interrupt you mid-flow.”

Read the story in full below.

Kilo Pass comes to pass

How do you price an AI coding tool when every keystroke has a real, recurring cost? That’s the million-token question Kilo Code is striving to answer with the launch of Kilo Pass, a new “momentum”-based subscription designed for regular, sustained use of AI in software development.

To rewind just a little, commercial open source startups (COSS) have long struggled with a familiar financial tension: how to build sustainable businesses around software that is, by design, freely available. The standard playbook typically revolves around things like hosted services, support contracts, or enterprise features layered on top of an “open core.” While there are pros and cons to these approaches, they all share a common characteristic: running the open source software itself typically does not impose significant, ongoing costs on the project’s developers, because execution happens on the user’s own infrastructure.

The rapid rise of AI adds a distinct economic wrinkle to that problem. Unlike traditional open source software, AI-powered tools carry direct, recurring costs every time they are used, driven by model inference that consumes GPU compute and electricity, and is typically metered in tokens—the units of text that AI model providers charge for processing. As developers increasingly rely on AI for longer-running tasks and autonomous agents, those costs scale with usage, but not always in ways developers can easily see or predict. For open source–aligned companies, this creates a dilemma: how to stay open and predictable without drifting toward limits, lock-ins, or licensing changes as usage grows.

It’s against this backdrop that Kilo Code, an open source AI coding agent, has launched Kilo Pass, a new subscription model built around what the company calls “momentum-based” usage. Rather than bundling AI access behind flat “unlimited” plans, Kilo converts subscription payments into non-expiring balances that developers spend directly on AI model usage, priced at the providers’ published rates, with additional bonus credits tied to sustained use.

The launch reflects a view that early pricing models across the AI coding landscape were misaligned with how these tools would actually be used in practice. Fixed monthly plans were simple to market, but they left little room for the sharp increases in compute demand that come with more frequent, longer-running AI-assisted workflows.

“A lot of AI coding tools started with flat subscriptions because everyone hoped model costs would drop fast enough to make unlimited use sustainable,” Kilo Code CEO Scott Breitenother explained to Forkable over email. “In reality, per-user usage scaled, and while the price of a specific model trends down over time, the cost of frontier models has remained stable.”

As those economics became harder to ignore, many products opted for incremental guardrails — adding caps, throttles, or slowdowns to rein in usage without revisiting the underlying pricing model.

And so Kilo’s approach speaks to a broader shift in how developers are responding to usage limits, model lock-ins, and opaque pricing as AI tools become more central to their work.

“That concern is valid, and we’re seeing it play out in real time,” Breitenother said. “Developers are pushing back on tools that combine limits with lock-in and unclear pricing.”

By way of example, Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding product, has become a recent flashpoint for developer frustration around limits and lock-in. While Anthropic offers higher-tier subscriptions aimed at power users, it recently restricted access to its Opus model when used through third-party tools.

As a result, developers paying for Claude’s higher-end plans could no longer use those benefits inside external coding environments such as OpenCode, Cursor, or Windsurf, and were instead confined to Anthropic’s own product surface. For many, that change underscored concerns that pricing and access controls were being used less to manage infrastructure costs, and more to shape where and how AI tools could be used.

“Kilo Pass is designed to go the opposite direction – we believe in being transparent about costs, not locking people into a single model or vendor, never throttling usage, and avoiding confusing credit systems,” Breitenother continued. “You can use a wide range of models, you pay true pass-through pricing, and the value in the pass comes from bonus credits, not restrictions.”

The path to Kilo Pass

Kilo launched some nine months back, courtesy of a founding team that includes GitLab co-founder and former CEO Sid Sijbrandij. Breitenother joined as CEO in September after the founding CEO stepped aside for personal reasons, and shortly after raised $8 million in seed funding.

At its core, Kilo Code is a multi-model coding environment designed to work across the IDE, command-line interface, and cloud-based agents. The project’s agent framework is open source, while model inference — the act of running AI models — is commercial, with developers paying for usage.

Until now, Kilo has charged developers directly for AI usage on a pay-as-you-go basis, with teams paying separately for team or collaboration features, and the option to bring their own API keys or run inference on their own infrastructure.

With Kilo Pass, the company is formalizing that usage-based approach into a recurring subscription, responding to growing frustration with how AI coding tools manage heavy usage behind the scenes, especially through pricing and access rules that shape day-to-day use.

“We didn’t want to play games with ‘behaviour’,” Breitenother said. “Limits and throttling usually feel random and frustrating, especially when they interrupt you mid-flow. Our principle from the start has been simple: don’t throttle people.”

Kilo Pass is offered as a monthly or annual subscription that adds money directly to a developer’s Kilo balance, which is then used to pay for AI model usage at providers’ list rates. Monthly plans are priced at $19, $49, or $199, with the subscription balance never expiring. On top of that balance, subscribers receive monthly bonus credits, which provide additional usage but expire at the end of each month.

Importantly, Kilo Pass doesn’t mark up model pricing or introduce usage controls. Instead, it’s structured to reward longer-term commitment, giving Kilo more predictable revenue while leaving developers in control of how they use the software.

“They’re [bonus credits] designed to reward people who are actively building, not to encourage stockpiling,” Breitenother explained. “The longer you stay subscribed, the higher your boost percentage becomes, up to a cap.”

Annual plans, on the other hand, cost the equivalent of twelve months paid upfront, but come with a key difference: subscribers receive a flat 50% bonus in boost credits each month, rather than gradually building toward that level over time.

In both cases, the bonus credits expire monthly, while the underlying paid balance remains available indefinitely.

When open source economics meets the reality of AI

Kilo’s move comes at a time when the broader open source ecosystem is grappling with how AI is reshaping sustainability. Just last week, the team behind Tailwind CSS – a widely used open source framework for styling web applications – cut the majority of its engineering staff after a reported drop in developer traffic. The project’s creator linked this in part to AI tools intermediating access to developer documentation, reducing direct traffic to the project’s site and their ability to convert developers to paid plans.

The episode underscored how AI is reshaping the relationship between open source projects and their users, altering where value is captured. In Tailwind’s case, AI tools increasingly sit between developers and documentation, weakening a key conversion path that had supported commercial products. Elsewhere, including at Kilo, the pressure shows up differently — through real, ongoing infrastructure costs tied directly to usage.

Against that backdrop, Kilo’s bet is that pricing models themselves need to evolve to reflect the real costs AI introduces, without undermining developer trust or openness. It also points to a broader tension now facing open source–aligned companies, as rising infrastructure costs collide with expectations of predictability and long-term sustainability.

Indeed, for Breitenother, Kilo Pass is perhaps as much about avoiding future trade-offs as solving today’s problems.

“A lot of licensing pressure comes from the same place,” he said. “Costs spike, pricing no longer matches reality, and companies reach for stronger control levers. Sometimes that shows up as throttling. Sometimes it’s lock-in. Sometimes it turns into licensing changes.”

If pricing can better reflect real usage, he argues, that pressure eases. “Kilo Pass is our attempt to prove you can keep trust high, keep the product open, and still support heavy real-world usage in a sustainable way.”

This week’s lead story looks at Google’s plan to slow the pace of Android source code drops to AOSP, and what that shift means for developers who depend on timely visibility into platform changes.

Elsewhere, there’s a tough illustration of open source sustainability pressures as Tailwind CSS cuts staff after an AI-driven traffic drop, plus a related note on the Open Source Pledge and the flow of funding commitments that followed. There’s also a security warning about VS Code forks, Microsoft open-sourcing its XAML Studio visual design tool, and more.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

Open issue

A new cadence for Android development

For some two decades, Google has published source code to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) for every major and minor Android version, making each platform release available to the wider ecosystem. That approach gave developers, custom ROM builders, device manufacturers, and security researchers regular access to Android’s underlying changes, allowing them to sync repositories, build forks, and test updates as new versions arrived.

Starting in 2026, however, Google is reducing the frequency of those public AOSP source drops, moving from a roughly quarterly cadence to just two releases per year: once in Q2 and once in Q4.

Google says the shift aims to align with its internal “trunk stable” development model and improve platform stability for the broader ecosystem. Translated, this means simplifying Android’s internal development by working from a single codebase and releasing source code only at carefully controlled points.

First reported this week by Android Authority, the change is now visible on the official Android source site, where a new banner explains the policy and recommends developers build from the android-latest-release branch instead of the old aosp-main workflow.

For everyday Android users, this shift won’t affect how quickly security patches arrive on their devices, with Google confirming that monthly security fixes and security-branch updates will remain unchanged. But for communities that depend on consistently timely source access, the impact is more tangible.

Independent developers and projects such as custom ROM teams have already felt the effects of slower or delayed source availability. Last year, the source code for Android 16’s first quarterly platform update was notably late to land on AOSP, frustrating some in the community, though the following update arrived more predictably.

Android’s permissive Apache-licensed code has been one of the pillars enabling forks, alternative builds, and transparent platform development since the project’s early days. Reducing the cadence of public source drops doesn’t negate all of that, but it does change how and when developers gain visibility into Android’s changes, highlighting a familiar tension in vendor-led open source projects between control and transparency.

Read more: Android Authority

Patch notes

Tailwind CSS cuts staff after AI hits developer traffic

Tailwind CSS, a popular open source CSS framework that lets developers style websites using ready-made utility classes directly in HTML, has laid off 75% of its engineering team (from 4 to 1) after a reported 40% drop in website traffic. Project creator Adam Wathan attributed the decline largely to developers turning to AI tools instead of Tailwind help documentation, which had been a key driver for commercial signups.

The episode highlights how even widely used open source projects struggle to generate sufficient revenue for development, with AI worsening the crisis. Which leads us nicely to the next Patch notes story…

Read more: Search Engine Roundtable & GitHub

A strong tailwind for open source funding?

The issue of open source funding is a perennial challenge, but there are active efforts to address this. This includes the Open Source Pledge, an initiative launched by Sentry back in 2024 that commits companies to contributing a portion of their revenue to the open source projects they rely on — including another $750,000 annual allocation in 2025.

In the wake of the Tailwind news, the folks at Sentry, via its Syntax media brand, became a premium Tailwind sponsor to the tune of $5,000 / month. As did others from both the Open Source Pledge and elsewhere, including Google’s AI Studio team, as per this post from product lead Logan Kilpatrick.

The community stepping up to provide support is heartening, but it doesn’t change the reality that many open source projects remain financially fragile and reliant on goodwill, sponsorships, and other indirect revenue streams.

Read more: Sentry & Open Source Pledge & Adam Wathan (X)

VS Code forks expose users to malicious extension recommendations

Several forks of Microsoft’s open-source VS Code editor were found to be at risk of recommending malicious add-ons, after security researchers uncovered a flaw in how extension suggestions were handled.

According to security firm Koi, popular AI-focused VS Code forks such as Cursor, Windsurf, Google Antigravity, and Trae reused Microsoft’s built-in extension recommendation lists without fully adapting them to their own extension stores. As a result, these editors sometimes suggested extensions that didn’t actually exist in their marketplaces.

This opened the door for attackers to potentially upload malicious extensions using those names and have them appear as trusted recommendations inside the editor. Koi said it stepped in and claimed the unused extension names first to prevent abuse, and notified the affected projects.

While there’s no evidence that real attacks occurred, the issue highlights a broader risk in open source software: when projects copy shared components without also copying the security checks behind them, users can be exposed to unexpected threats.

Read more: Bleeping Computer & Koi

Microsoft ushers XAML Studio into the open

Microsoft open-sourced XAML Studio, a visual design tool used to build and preview XAML-based user interfaces for Windows apps. By releasing the project’s code publicly under the MIT license, Microsoft says it hopes to make the tool easier to extend, maintain, and adapt as Windows UI frameworks evolve.

Read more: Microsoft

Percona puts the ‘open’ in Everest

Database company Percona is set to rename its Kubernetes database platform Everest as OpenEverest, with plans afoot to move the project toward independent governance.

The company said the goal is to donate OpenEverest to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), while a newly formed company will take on commercial support and development responsibilities. The shift is meant to clarify Everest’s status as an open source project, reduce vendor control concerns, and give users clearer assurances about its long-term neutrality.

Read more: Percona

Bose has ‘sound’ open principles

As Bose prepares to wind down official support for its SoundTouch smart speaker platform, the company revealed it would make the platform’s technical specifications and APIs publicly available.

The move gives owners and developers the ability to maintain, replace, or extend the software used to control and integrate SoundTouch-enabled home theater and speaker systems after Bose ends updates. While the device firmware itself remains closed, the decision allows the community to preserve functionality and build alternatives to Bose’s official apps — a rare example of a consumer electronics company giving a second thought to users once a proprietary platform reaches end-of-life.

Read more: Ars Technica & Bose

Ghostty terminal gains nonprofit fiscal sponsor

Ghostty has secured nonprofit fiscal sponsorship, giving the project a formal legal and financial structure without becoming a company. The arrangement allows the open source terminal emulator to accept donations, manage funds, and pay for infrastructure while remaining community-focused and independent.

Read more: OMG! Ubuntu

Open Source Founders Summit returns for 2026

Ticket sales have opened for the 2026 edition of the Open Source Founders Summit, a two-day event aimed at leaders running companies built around open source software (read my feature interview with the summit’s creators from earlier this year). The summit focuses on the practical opportunities and risks that come with building commercial organisations on open source foundations, from funding and governance to growth and sustainability.

The 2026 event is set to take place in Paris on May 18–19.

Read more: Open Source Founders Summit & Tickets

And finally…

Scientists have a whale of a time

Researchers working with Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) have published details of a new underwater system designed to record, analyse, and cautiously respond to sperm whale communication. Described in a recent peer-reviewed paper, the system focuses on distinctive click patterns — known as codas — that whales use for social interaction. Rather than attempting direct translation, the researchers analyse structure and repetition in these sounds and observe how whales respond when specific signals are played back.

What makes the work notable is its commitment to open source science. The team has openly released both the hardware and software used to capture, process, and analyse whale vocalisations, along with detailed designs and fabrication notes. This allows other researchers to reproduce the system, validate the results, or build on the work — turning what could have been a bespoke research tool into a shared scientific resource.

Read more: PLOS One & Earth.com

This week’s lead story digs into GitHub’s aborted attempt to start charging for self-hosted Actions runners, and the swift backlash that followed from developers.

Elsewhere, there’s a sobering update on how the Log4Shell fallout continues to linger, a Danish government agency making a clean break from Microsoft, and more.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

Open issue

GitHub’s runner rate rethink

Few things unsettle developers like being told they’ll have to pay for something that used to be free. That lesson landed squarely on GitHub this week, after the Microsoft-owned platform announced new fees for self-hosted GitHub Actions runners.

GitHub Actions, for the uninitiated, are the automation system built into GitHub that lets developers automatically run tasks (e.g. running tests or deploying updates) when code changes are made.

Runners, meanwhile, are the machines that execute those automated tasks. GitHub offers its own cloud-hosted runners, which are billed by the minute. But many teams opt for self-hosted runners, running the same workloads on their own servers or cloud infrastructure to control costs, improve performance, or meet security and compliance requirements.

With that in mind, GitHub announced that starting next March, it would begin charging $0.002 per minute for jobs executed on self-hosted runners. The change was presented alongside reductions in the cost of GitHub-hosted runners, part of what the company described as a move toward simpler pricing.

While the proposed change did not apply to public repositories — theoretically leaving open source projects untouched — in reality it would’ve had real consequences for research and open-science workflows that sit in a grey area between private and public development. For instance, academic labs and publicly funded research teams often rely on private repositories to develop software, analyze sensitive data, or prepare code tied to papers and dissertations before releasing it openly. For those teams, self-hosted runners are a necessity, allowing them to manage long-running, compute-heavy workloads within tight budgets.

One Reddit user, who said they work in a lab at a large U.S. research university funded by public health grants, made exactly this point, describing how they use GitHub Actions to build and ship a desktop app that helps researchers quickly run genetic analyses. The work needs to stay private for now, but the goal is to make it open source in the future.

The user pulled zero punches in their assessment.

“Microsoft loves to advertise when labs at research universities like us do cool research and use their products, but they don’t tell you that when they pull this kind of s**t it just ends up f*****g us,” they wrote. “I don’t know if we’re even able to migrate off GitHub, because it’s a lab with tons of private repos and members working on various projects. For now, GitHub is the one tool that most members can at least navigate.”

Over on LinkedIn, Duckbill chief cloud economist Corey Quinn summed up the reaction bluntly, questioning why developers should be billed when they are already paying for and maintaining their own infrastructure. “You bring your own hardware. You pay for your own compute. You maintain your own infrastructure,” Quinn wrote. “And GitHub wants to charge you… for the privilege of them not running your jobs? This is like your electric company billing you for the sunlight hitting your solar panels.”

GitHub, for its part, argued that this infrastructure is not free to operate. In a FAQ accompanying the announcement, the company said self-hosted runners had historically relied on GitHub Actions services that were effectively subsidized by hosted-runner pricing. The new fees, GitHub said, would better align costs with usage, emphasizing that the vast majority of customers would see no increase to their bills.

Within days, GitHub backtracked, announcing that it would postpone the self-hosted runner billing change to “re-evaluate” its approach, while proceeding with planned price cuts for GitHub-hosted runners.

For the open source community, the episode underscores a familiar tension. GitHub is both a commercial service and a foundational piece of open source infrastructure. Even when public repositories are spared, changes that reshape long-standing assumptions around cost and control can ripple through the ecosystem, testing trust in a platform many projects depend on daily.

Read more: GitHub & The Register

Patch notes

A fork in the road for Danish traffic authority

Denmark’s Road Traffic Authority is ditching Microsoft as part of a growing push to reduce dependency on proprietary software and bolster its independence. The change reflects broader public sector interest in diversifying beyond the dominant vendor platforms, with the agency shifting toward open source alternatives.

Read more: DR (Danish) & It’s FOSS

Log4j vulnerability still widespread despite fixes

Some four years after the infamous Log4Shell security flaw first emerged, data provided by software supply-chain firm Sonatype shows that around 13% of Log4j downloads still contain the vulnerability even though safe versions have existed for years. This reflects a broader pattern where developers and organisations continue to pull in outdated open source components rather than updating to secure releases.

Read more: Sonatype

Nvidia buys SchedMD but keeps Slurm in the open

Nvidia has acquired SchedMD, the company behind Slurm, a leading open source workload management system used in high-performance computing and AI clusters. Nvidia says it will continue distributing Slurm as open source, while investing in its development.

Read more: Nvidia

Google launches A2UI for agent-driven interfaces

Google has open-sourced A2UI, a new project for building user interfaces around AI agents. The goal is to make it easier to design consistent, interactive ways for people to work with agent-based systems.

Read more: Google

And finally…

Open source weighs in with MacBook trackpad scales

This might not be “news” as such, but it was news to me — and it serves a neat reminder that there are surprising tricks hiding inside familiar hardware.

A few months back, a developer by the name of Krish Shah took to the social network formerly known as Twitter to show how a MacBook’s trackpad can double as a digital weighing scale. By tapping into low-level Force Touch pressure data, Shah demonstrated that you can measure the weight of small objects placed on the trackpad, so long as a finger remains in contact to “activate” the sensors.

Shah later packaged the experiment up as an open source macOS app called TrackWeight, complete with calibration against a real digital scale and a list of limitations. It won’t be replacing your kitchen scales any time soon, but it’s accurate enough to be impressive.

It’s also a reminder of the creative lengths developers will go to when they’re willing to step outside Apple’s sandbox and poke at undocumented corners of the system. Not exactly a killer app — but a fun, subversive demo of what’s possible when curiosity outweighs convention.

Read more: Krish Shah [X] & GitHub

This week’s lead story looks at the industry’s latest attempt to set common ground for agentic AI, as OpenAI, Anthropic and a wide cast of major tech companies rally around a new foundation for open standards.

Elsewhere, there’s a landmark acquisition in the streaming-data world, a serious 0-day hitting a long-running open-source Git service, fresh developer tooling from Mistral, a lively “open source vs source available” debate, and more.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

Open issue

A new dawn for agentic AI?

A new industry alliance is taking shape around the infrastructure that underpins agentic AI systems.

Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the Agentic Artificial Intelligence Foundation (AAIF) launched this week with a trio of big-name AI projects under its wing, with donations including Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), OpenAI’s Agents.md specification, and Block’s local-first agent framework, Goose.

Arguably, the centrepiece of this week’s news is MCP, a fast-growing open standard introduced by Anthropic late last year to let AI systems interact with tools, data sources, and applications through a common interface. By placing MCP in an independent foundation, Anthropic argued that the protocol can evolve with broader community input and avoid being shaped by the priorities of any single company.

“The AAIF aims to ensure agentic AI evolves transparently, collaboratively, and in the public interest through strategic investment, community building, and shared development of open standards,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post.

Alongside MCP, the two other inaugural contributions provide a strong suggestion for what the foundation wants to become. Agents.md, debuted by OpenAI earlier this year, is also emerging as a widely adopted open standard for AI agents, designed to consolidate setup commands, build steps, coding conventions, and testing workflows into one file that every supported agent knows to check first.

And then there’s Goose, contributed by Square and Cash App–parent Block, which open-sourced the framework back in January. Goose provides a more controlled, predictable environment for building and executing AI agent workflows, with an emphasis on local-first operation rather than cloud dependence.

The launch also drew backing from a broad gamut of technology firms, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Shopify, Snowflake, Datadog, IBM, Docker, JetBrains, Salesforce and Uber. Notably, this shows that support cuts across nearly every layer of the software world, from the biggest infrastructure players to the tools and platforms millions of developers rely on.

While the foundation is still in its early stages, its formation marks a seismic shift: large AI firms publicly committing to open, neutral infrastructure for one of the field’s most strategically significant technologies.

The gist is this: establishing common ground now, reduces the risk of the agent landscape splintering later.

“We’re at a critical moment for AI – the technology that will define the next decade, that promises to be the biggest engine of economic growth since the Internet, can either remain closed and proprietary for the benefit of few, or be driven by open standards, open protocols, and open access for the benefit of all,” Block’s head of open source, Manik Surtani, said.

Read more: AI Native Dev & Anthropic

Patch notes

IBM buys Confluent for $11B

IBM is set to acquire Confluent, which offers an enterprise data-streaming platform built on the open-source Apache Kafka project. The deal, which values Confluent at $11 billion, is framed as a way to deepen IBM’s data and AI portfolio, bringing Kafka-based streaming, governance and integration tools under one roof so enterprises can feed real-time data into generative-AI and agent-driven systems more reliably.

Read more: IBM

Gogs hit by 0-day exploit

A previously unknown vulnerability in the open source Git service Gogs was found under active exploitation this week, prompting urgent updates across self-hosted installations. The flaw gave attackers a route into unpatched servers, with older deployments proving especially vulnerable. The incident adds another chapter to the project’s history of sporadic security challenges, and underscores the maintenance pressures that come with operating open source developer infrastructure.

Read more: The Register

Mistral expands its developer stack

French frontier AI model lab Mistral has introduced Vibe CLI, an open source command-line agent aimed at improving code-generation workflows. Alongside this, Mistral debuted DevStral 2, a new set of open-weight models for enterprise software engineering. By focusing on open source tooling and modifiable model weights, Mistral is positioning its developer stack as a more flexible alternative to proprietary, closed agent frameworks.

Read more: AI Native Dev

Linux shifts into gear

A new Linux-based automotive platform aims to bring over-the-air updates to consumer vehicles as early as 2027, leaning on open source foundations to give automakers more control over their software stacks. This reflects a broader push toward open standards and replaceable components in the auto industry, reducing reliance on closed vendor ecosystems and dealership-bound update cycles.

Read more: ZDNet

German state counts the cost of Microsoft

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has long expressed its mission to move away from Microsoft products in favour of open source alternatives as part of a broader digital-sovereignty push. New figures suggest that strategy could be paying off: public administration estimates show as much as €15 million could be saved in 2026 alone from adopting open source office suites, mail systems and collaboration tools. That data offers concrete backing to a policy that has been watched closely across Europe, where governments are weighing the financial and strategic trade-offs of reducing dependence on proprietary platforms.

Read more: Heise

DeepSeek paper widens the open–closed debate

A new technical report from DeepSeek on its V3.2 model has sparked debate by arguing that the performance gap between open-source and closed-source large models is not shrinking but widening. The paper compares DeepSeek’s strongest open-source system against closed models like GPT-5 and Gemini 3.0 Pro, and points to three structural problems holding open source back: aging model architectures, smaller post-training compute budgets, and weaker agent capabilities. At the same time, it presents DeepSeek’s own work as evidence that open source can still compete through architectural innovation and smarter reinforcement learning, rather than trying to match proprietary players on raw resources alone.

Read more: 36kr

Another twist in Vizio GPL saga

A long-running legal dispute over Vizio’s compliance with GPL — a populer so-called “copyleft” license — took a turn this week when a U.S. appeals court revived the Software Freedom Conservancy’s (SFC) case. The judges ruled that consumers may have standing to enforce the GPL as third-party beneficiaries, reopening a lawsuit that had previously been dismissed. The decision adds a new chapter to the years-long saga over access to source code in Vizio’s smart-TV firmware, and could shape how open source rights and copyleft obligations are enforced across mass-market hardware.

Read more: The Register

And finally…

Open source world gets in a fizz

The debate over what counts as “open source” is as old as time, and this week it resurfaced once more with a high degree of vigour. The spark came when 37signals unveiled a new “open source” project called Fizzy, but under a home-grown licence dubbed O’Saasy. While it is apparently derived from the MIT licence, there are substantial restrictions that place it firmly in the realm of source-available, not open source.

WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg accused the folks behind Fizzy — which include Ruby on Rails’ creator David Heinemeier Hansson— of “greenwashing.” Drupal author Dries Buytaert, meanwhile, gently reminded everyone that “source available” is not the same as open source. And Sentry’s Chad Whitacre, a key figure behind a new licensing paradigm dubbed “fair source,” argued that while Fizzy is clearly source available, it sits close enough to the fair-source definition that a small tweak could bring it fully into that category. But yeah, it’s certainly not “open source.”

Hansson, for his part, brushed off the criticism, saying it was “hilarious” that calling Fizzy open source had triggered some developers, and defended O’Saasy on the grounds that it merely reserves SaaS monetisation rights for the original creators.

It’s a familiar dust-up, and a timely reminder that in an era crowded with bespoke licences and commercial hybrids, the label open source still carries enough weight that people will fight over who gets to use it.

Read more: Matt Mullenweg & Dries Buytaert & Chad Whitacre

This week’s lead story looks at the quiet but telling stream of open source projects peeling themselves away from GitHub, and what their reasons reveal about shifting attitudes toward dependence on a single dominant platform.

Elsewhere, there’s a major runtime acquisition in the JavaScript world, a hefty new funding round for open weights imaging, fresh open model releases, and a sweep of new tooling from Nvidia.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

Open issue

Calling time on GitHub

The open source world continues to revolve around one platform: GitHub, the dominant code-hosting platform owned by Microsoft. But that centrality has begun to look a little shaky, as a stream of developers and projects publicly distance themselves from the service.

In the past week alone, the Zig programming language and the Dillo browser project announced full migrations away from GitHub, with Zig citing a mix of technical frustrations and discomfort with GitHub’s increasingly AI-centric direction.

While Rodrigo Arias Mallo from Dillo pointed to a number of technical factors that made GitHub less suitable for the project, including the site’s heavy reliance on JavaScript and its increasingly resource-hungry interface, he also highlighted GitHub representing a “single point of failure” that concentrated too much control in one place.

“I don’t mean that GitHub is stored in a single machine, but it is controlled by a single entity which can unilaterally ban our repository or account and we would lose the ability to notify in that URL what happened,” Mallo wrote. “This can cause data loss if we don’t have a local copy of all the data.”

Andrew Kelley, president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation, said the project’s decision stemmed from mounting concerns about GitHub’s reliability and shifting priorities — particularly around AI.

“After the CEO of GitHub said to ‘embrace AI or get out’, it seems the lackeys at Microsoft took the hint, because GitHub Actions started ‘vibe-scheduling’; choosing jobs to run seemingly at random,” Kelley wrote. “Combined with other bugs and inability to manually intervene, this causes our CI system to get so backed up that not even master branch commits get checked.”

In late summer, the open source space trading game Naev also revealed it was ditching GitHub, framing its move as both a philosophical and practical realignment: moving to a Forgejo-based host promised a more stable, values-aligned home and more freedom from the gravitational pull of a corporate-owned ecosystem.

“Ever since Microsoft bought GitHub, we felt that the days we could stay on the platform were numbered,” project’s developer team wrote. “Despite that, Naev has stayed on GitHub passed [sic] our expectations, but now it seems like it is finally the time to get off the platform due to a combination of Microsoft supporting and pushing for quite bad things that we have never been able to ethically support.”

Others, too have made similar decisions in recent years. Back in 2022, I reported for TechCrunch that the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) was quitting GitHub, calling on all open source developers to follow suit. The group argued that GitHub had trained its AI coding assistant Copilot on vast amounts of open source code without adequate transparency or respect for the licences governing those projects, effectively turning community work into a proprietary commercial product. It framed Copilot as a threat to software freedom, contending that GitHub’s approach undermined the norms of consent, credit, and reciprocity that open source communities rely on.

Across the spate of recent departures, a common thread emerges: maintainers are increasingly uneasy with relying on a single corporate-controlled code-hosting platform, whose priorities feel out of step with their own. Concerns span the practical — unreliable CI pipelines, performance quirks, and ecosystem friction — to the ideological, including discomfort with GitHub’s accelerating AI focus and the opaque licensing questions that come with it. For minimalist or resource-sensitive projects, the appeal of simpler, self-hosted infrastructure has grown, while others frame the move as a matter of open source principles and long-term autonomy.

While it would be something of a stretch to call the recent spate of migrations a major “trend” (the powers that be at Microsoft and GitHub are unlikely to lose much sleep), it does reflect a broader desire to reclaim control, reduce dependency, and align tooling with the values of the communities that rely on it. Collectively, these exits also resonate with another development unfolding beyond the open source world: the growing push among European institutions to distance themselves from Microsoft’s gravitational pull.

Across Europe, a steady political drumbeat has been urging both the public and public institutions to loosen their dependence on Big Tech. Earlier this year, Signal briefly became the most downloaded app in the Netherlands, while governments and public bodies more broadly have begun replacing parts of their Microsoft-heavy stacks with open source alternatives.

Last month, Forkable reported that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is replacing Microsoft Office with OpenDesk — a European open-source productivity suite developed under Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund. The reason? Sanctions imposed by the U.S. on ICC staff, which reportedly led some ICC staff — including Prosecutor Karim Khan — to lose access to key Microsoft services.

It’s a similar story elsewhere, as a growing constellation of public sector organisations map out futures that are less dependent on any one company’s cloud, productivity suite, or security model. And in that light, the open source projects quietly peeling themselves away from GitHub begin to reflect that wider shift: a slow, uneven but perceptible move toward greater autonomy in the tools people build, use and depend on.

Read more: Zig & Dillo

Patch notes

Anthropic’s honey Bun

Anthropic has acquired the JavaScript runtime Bun, folding the tool and its team into its wider developer platform, just as Anthropic says Claude Code passed a $1 billion annualised revenue milestone. Bun will remain open source under an MIT licence, and Anthropic says it plans to keep investing in its role as a high-performance runtime, bundler, package manager and test runner for JavaScript and TypeScript developers.

Read more: Anthropic

Black Forest has its gâteau and eats it

German frontier AI lab Black Forest Labs has raised $300 million at a $3.25 billion valuation, to scale its open weights image-generation models. The investment positions the company as a significant European counterweight in generative imaging, highlighting an ongoing appetite for more “open” approaches in foundation-model development.

Read more: Black Forest Labs

Nvidia accelerates open model development

Nvidia this week unveiled a sweeping set of open models, datasets and frameworks, from speech and safety AI to robotics and autonomous-vehicle toolkits. At the centre is DRIVE Alpamayo-R1 (AR1), described as the world’s first industry-scale open reasoning vision-language-action model for autonomous-driving research. Alongside AR1, Nvidia released synthetic-data tools, robotics simulation frameworks and open safety models.

Read more: Nvidia

OpenAGI steps out of stealth

A new startup, OpenAGI, emerged from stealth this week with an AI agent it claims can outperform existing systems, including those from OpenAI. The company presents its agent as a general-purpose problem-solver for complex, multi-step tasks and has open sourced parts of its infrastructure, including its OSGym training engine and SDK.

Read more: VentureBeat & OpenAGI

Mistral turns the dial to 3

French AI startup Mistral has released its latest family of open models, Mistral 3, continuing its strategy of offering high-performance systems under permissive licences. The update strengthens the company’s push to compete with larger U.S. players, while giving developers and enterprises modifiable alternatives to proprietary models.

Read more: Mistral

And finally…

No longer evil…

When Google announced it was discontinuing support for older Nest thermostats, it served as yet another reminder of how quickly connected devices can slip from “smart” to, well, useless.

Luckily, a new community-driven project has stepped in to keep those units breathing. No Longer Evil is courtesy of researcher and developer Cody Kociemba, who says he was banned from the Google Play Store without explanation and has little faith left in Google’s stewardship of smart-home devices.

The project offers a workaround (open source, natch) that restores core functionality for the abandoned hardware, ensuring the thermostats continue to operate long after their official sunset.

It’s a modest fix, but a satisfying one: a tiny act of resistance against the quiet decay of perfectly good hardware.

Read more: Liliputing & No Longer Evil

The lead story this week digs into the debate around “porks” — the idea that proprietary forks deserve their own label — following fresh scrutiny of Google’s Antigravity platform and its Windsurf lineage.

Elsewhere, there’s new analysis on maintainer burnout, fresh open-source moves from Mozilla, Ai2 the Linux Foundation, and much more.

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

Open issue

Google brings home the bacon

“Forking” is a concept that anchors much of the open source world, describing the moment when someone takes an existing codebase and carries it in a new direction. But what happens when a company appears to fork a closed, commercial product instead of an open one? That’s the dilemma explored by AI coding agent startup Kilo Code, which argues that this kind of move deserves its own label: “pork.”

The term came about after Google released its latest AI model, Gemini 3, accompanied by its new agentic development platform Antigravity. Early chatter focused on whether Antigravity was simply another VS Code fork, a reference to the open source code editor that many developers know and love. But as developers dug in, they found broad references to Windsurf (an AI-powered IDE) and Cascade (Windsurf’s coding agent) scattered throughout Antigravity’s interface and packaged code.

Windsurf began life as a VS Code–based environment layered on its own closed-source agentic architecture. Back in July, Google licensed the underlying technology and acqui-hired key members of its founding team in a deal reportedly worth $2.4 billion. And it’s against that backdrop that the presence of Windsurf-related identifiers inside Antigravity led some observers to argue that Google’s new tool isn’t merely a VS Code fork, but something closer to a direct continuation of Windsurf under a different banner.

Darko Gjorgjievski, part of the developer relations team at Kilo Code, argues that the situation reflects a kind of fork that mimics open-source lineage while offering none of its transparency — a high-stakes proprietary fork (a “pork”) shaped by corporate licensing, closed code and limited visibility into what sits beneath the surface.

“Our research reveals that Antigravity isn’t just a VS Code fork, but a literal Windsurf fork,” he wrote. “Windsurf is proprietary software that Google licensed for close to $2 billion.”

The whole concept of “forks of forks” is, of course, nothing new in the open source sphere. As Gjorgjievski points out, Kilo Code itself began as a fork of Roo Code, which in turn stemmed from Cline, and that openness meant each project could build on the last while users benefited from a growing superset of features. But when the same pattern shows up in the closed source world (i.e. Antigravity building on Windsurf, which drew from VS Code) the transparency stops, and the lineage becomes something users must infer rather than inspect. And that’s the real divide between forks and porks: one invites participation, the other obscures it.

“You can’t fork PORKs,” Gjorgjievski said.

Read more: Kilo Code blog

Patch notes

Maintainer burnout a ‘structural problem’

A new report from the Open Source Pledge initiative suggests that burnout among open source maintainers is a structural issue rather than an individual one. It highlights chronic overwork, unpaid expectations and escalating pressure on maintainers whose projects underpin critical software infrastructure — and suggests that better funding, coordination and governance are needed to keep ecosystems healthy.

Read more: Open Source Pledge

Arduino’s new terms spark concern

Arduino’s updated terms of service (ToS) have raised alarm among hobbyists, as the company prepares to join Qualcomm in an acquisition first announced in October. Critics worry the changes may give the company more leeway to restrict third-party use, raising questions about how the platform’s open source roots will fare under new ownership.

Read more: Ars Technica

Google flexes its font chops

Google has released Google Sans Flex, a variable, open source typeface originally introduced with the company’s 2023 Material 3 update, offering an adaptable design with wide language support. The font is already drawing interest from Linux users, who can install it manually on Ubuntu and other distributions.

Read more: OMG! Ubuntu

Linux Foundation launches ORCA alliance

The Linux Foundation has introduced the Open Robust Compartmentalization Alliance (ORCA), a new industry group focused on advancing software compartmentalization. The effort aims to improve security by promoting designs that isolate components so faults or attacks can’t easily spread through a system.

Read more: The Linux Foundation

Mozilla unveils Tabs API for open source browser automation

Mozilla has released a new open source Tabs API that allows AI tools and automation frameworks to control browser tabs programmatically. The API is positioned as a foundation for smarter browser assistants, automated workflows and more capable developer tools.

Read more: WebProNews

Olmo 3 charts a path for open source AI models

The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), a nonprofit research lab founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has released Olmo 3, a new generation of its open source model family designed to make training and evaluation fully transparent.

The update lands as open weight models — including recent entrants from China such as DeepSeek — raise expectations around openness and performance. Olmo 3 responds by offering not just weights but a reproducible training stack, positioning it as a clearer, more inspectable alternative.

Read more: Ai2 blog

Pebble watch software now fully open source

The software powering the original Pebble smartwatch has been released under an open source license. The move gives the long-running community of Pebble enthusiasts full access to the firmware and app stack, ensuring the device can be maintained and modified well beyond its commercial lifespan.

Read more: Eric Migi blog

And finally…

A distraction-free computer by design

An open source “retropunk” computer is turning heads for its unapologetically minimal approach to getting work done. Built around a Raspberry Pi and wrapped in a chunky, 1980s-style shell, the TypeFrame PX-88 is designed for just one thing: writing, without the infinite temptations of modern apps, tabs or notifications. A sibling variant, the more compact PS-85, offers the same focus-first philosophy in a smaller writerdeck form.

Its creator, designer Jeff Merrick, has released the full CAD files and electronics schematics, inviting anyone with a 3D printer and a soft spot for retro hardware to assemble their own. It’s a machine that treats focus as a hardware feature, not a settings option — and looks charmingly out of time while doing it.

Read more: Yanko Design / TypeFrame PX-88

The lead story this week is Microsoft’s move to open-source the original Zork trilogy, giving a glimpse into one of the formative codebases of early home computing and a notable moment in software preservation.

Elsewhere, there’s fresh funding for OpenHands’ open source coding agents, a long-running internal UI framework from Snap steps into the open, plus more!

As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.

Paul

Open issue

Stick a Zork in it!

Microsoft has released the source code for Zork I, Zork II and Zork III under the MIT License, working in partnership with Activision and the Internet Archive.

Originally developed by a group of MIT students in the late 1970s who went on to form Infocom, Zork became one of the most influential text-adventure series of the early home-computer era. Infocom was acquired by Activision in 1986, and the rights to the trilogy eventually passed to Microsoft as part of its 2023 acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

The newly opened repositories contain the raw source code, documentation and build instructions for all three titles. The games were built for the “Z-Machine,” a virtual environment that allowed a single story file to run across many different platforms — an approach that made Zork unusually portable for its time.

Crucially, the release covers only the code and related materials; trademarks and packaging assets remain with their owners. The intent, Microsoft says, is to make the games available for study and preservation, serving as a reference point for how a major commercial title of the early 1980s was structured, rather than to reintroduce the series commercially.

“Our goal is simple: to place historically important code in the hands of students, teachers, and developers so they can study it, learn from it, and, perhaps most importantly, play it,” Microsoft wrote.

Read more: Microsoft blog

Patch notes

A hefty helping hand for OpenHands

OpenHands has raised $18.8 million in a Series A round of funding. The Boston-based company offers an open source platform for cloud-based coding agents that integrates into enterprise environments with model-agnostic and multi-IDE support.

Read more: OpenHands blog

Valdi makes native UI a Snap

Snapchat-parent Snap has open-sourced Valdi, a cross-platform UI framework that lets developers write interfaces in TypeScript and compile them directly into native views on iOS, Android and macOS.

Read more: The New Stack

Pionix plants EVerest flag with €8m raise

Pionix, a German e-mobility software company founded in 2021, has raised €8 million in funding to scale its open source stack EVerest, with plans to unify global EV-charging infrastructure. EVerest is hosted by LF Energy, and has contributions from more than 600 individuals across over 70 organisations.

Read more: Pionix blog

Don’t imitate, replicate

Cloudflare announced this week that it’s acquiring Replicate, the company behind an open source tool called Cog, which packages machine-learning models into reproducible containers.

The deal aims to fold this model-execution layer into Cloudflare’s Workers platform and speed up deployment of AI applications at scale.

Read more: Cloudflare blog

And finally…

Solving maintainer burnout with… Cranberry sOSS?

The perennial plight to fund open source maintainers took a seasonal turn this week with the launch of Cranberry sOSS, a limited-run jar of organic cranberry sauce sold to raise money for open source project stewards.

Priced at a somewhat specific $13.37 and produced by Open Source Pledge (and its creator Sentry), all Cranberry sOSS proceeds will go to a publicly listed group of open source maintainers, selected through a model from open source funding platform Thanks.dev.

So… why $13.37? Well, presumably because 1337 is “leet” — a longstanding in-joke in hacker culture where 1337 playfully signals something as “elite,” making it a fittingly nerdy price tag for a fundraiser built around open source.

Read more: Cranberry sOSS & Open Source Pledge