The 'spirit' of open source means much more than a license

Plus: GitHub creates code from images; and OpenRewrite vendor gets a chunk of change.

Feb 14, 2025

In issue #4 of Forkable, we look at why the “spirit” of open source means much more than a license — without a real community, “open source” can be something of an illusion.

Elsewhere, GitHub — home to millions of open source projects — is pushing its Copilot coding assistant in new directions.

And an engineer who created an automated code-refactoring tool at Netflix has raised some lolly for a commercial product built on top of the OpenRewrite open source project.

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Happy weekend (when it comes).

Paul

Open issue

Team spirit

The State of Open Con conference came to London town last week, and over several panel discussions, a theme emerged — the “spirit” of open source matters just as much as any license.

As per my article on TechCrunch, Android — the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), that is — is pretty much the gold-standard in open source software from a licencing perspective. Anyone is free to take the software and launch a commercial product off the back of it.

However, there isn’t a great deal of “community” in Android — it’s Google, and Google only.

“Android, in a license sense, is perhaps the most well-documented, perfectly open ‘thing’ that there is,” Tidelift co-founder and general counsel Luis Villa said on stage. “All the licenses are exactly as you want them — but good luck getting a patch into that, and good luck figuring out when the next release even is.”

Moreover, companies can try to launch competing versions of Android, but it does a fat load of good if Google has forced anti-fragmentation agreements on handset makers, hindering Android forks.

Thus, open source can be something of an illusion if the wider world lacks any meanginful agency.

Moreover, vendor-led open source software is prone to license shake-ups, which raises questions about a project’s long-term viability. By contrast, projects that sit under the auspices of an independnet foundation, with a diversity of corporate and community contributors, are generally more aligned with the “spirit” of open source.

Dotan Horovits, open source evangelist at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), questioned whether “vendor-owned open source [is] an oxymoron?” And Peter Zaitsev, founder of open source database services company Percona, added that governance is a vital aspect of any open source project.

“If you think about the practical accessibility of open source, it goes beyond the license, right?” Zaitsev said.

And this is more relevant than ever today — particularly with the rise of “open source AI,” which has seen companies like Meta trying to corrupt the definition.

The rundown

Creating code from visual mockups

While GitHub has drawn ire over the way it has built its very proprietary Copilot coding assistant on community data, there’s no escaping the role GitHub plays in millions of projects around the world — and the AI-powerd Copilot juggernaut isn’t going away.

Last week, the Microsoft-owned platform teased a new “preview” feature called Vision for Copilot which allows users to upload an image and request Copilot to generate the UI, alt text, and relevant code “to go from vision to reality in minutes.”

So, someone in marketing could screenshot a web page, doodle some changes they want made, and upload that image for GitHub to enact those changes.

OpenRewrite the rules

While working as a software engineer at Netflix some years back, Jonathan Schneider created Rewrite to automate the process of refactoring Java code. This eventually morphed into an open source code refactoring tool called OpenRewrite, which in turn led Schneider to launch a commerical entity called Moderne which announced a $30 million fundraise this week.

The core OpenRewrite project is used by the likes of Microsoft in the aforementioned GitHub Copilot, forming part of a tool for updating Java apps. AWS is also using OpenRewrite as part of its Q Code Transformation tool.

But for companies wanting to solve technical debt across vast, complex codebases, that’s where Moderne enters the fray with multi-repository support, collaboration tools, analytics, and more.

Patch notes

Docker has a new CEO called Don Johnson. Not the Miami Vice guy, but the guy who helped Oracle transition from a legacy on-prem business to the cloud over a 10-year period.

Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) is a new non-profit body from the likes of Google, OpenAI, Discord, Roblox, and Eric Schmidt — it promises to provide “open source tools for a safer internet” in the age of AI.

AI company Anthropic launched the Anthropic Economic Index, a tool to help understand the impact of AI on the economy and labor markets. The company also open sourced the underlying dataset for others to build on.

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