This Week in Open Source for October 23, 2026

by Daryl Ducharme, Open Source Programs Office

A look around the world of open source

What actually sustains an open source community when the cost of generating code drops toward zero, while the human labor required to review, govern, and secure it stays just as demanding? Across this week's reads, researchers, legal scholars, and builders examine the tension between automated volume and human stewardship—from public-infrastructure policy and maintainer bandwidth to provenance transparency, copyright law, and compact models running entirely on local hardware. Because software only serves people when human judgment remains in the loop, protecting maintainer agency and keeping project doors open to real newcomers matter more than ever.

Upcoming Events

🗓️ October 2026

• Open Source AI Week 2026 (October 19–24, 2026) — San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA. Now in its final stretch across the Bay Area alongside PyTorch Conference, this decentralized week of community meetups, workshops, and hackathons—with Google DeepMind and Gemma as Platinum Sponsor—wraps up this weekend with tonight's Open Source AI Awards Night (Friday, October 23, 5:00–10:00 PM PT at Fort Mason, San Francisco) and tomorrow's Google Gemma Hardware Hackathon at AGI House (Saturday, October 24, 10:00 AM–5:00 PM PT in Hillsborough, CA).
• AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026 (October 22–23, 2026) — San Jose, California, USA. Happening this week, this Linux Foundation and Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) conference focuses on building and scaling production agentic systems with open standards—featuring keynotes by Google's Rao Surapaneni, Sarah Drasner, and Chi Wang, plus sessions from Googlers Alan Blount (on Agent-to-User Interface [A2UI]), Junjie Bu (on interoperable agent discovery), Amit Handa (on agentic commerce), Dominic Farolino (on Model Context Protocol [MCP] Apps + WebMCP), and Prerna Kakkar & Kurtis Van Gent (on EvalBench).
• GitHub Universe 2026 (October 28–29, 2026) — San Francisco, California, USA & Virtual. Annual global developer gathering highlighting open source workflows, collaborative security, and multi-model AI-assisted software engineering.

🗓️ November 2026

• Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF) New York (November 4–5, 2026) — New York, New York, USA. Dedicated industry conference examining open source compliance, supply-chain security, and collaborative innovation across regulated financial institutions.
• SeaGL (Seattle GNU/Linux Conference) 2026 (November 6–7, 2026) — Seattle, Washington, USA & Virtual. Free, grassroots technical summit dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge of free and open source software, hardware, and culture.
• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 (November 9–12, 2026) — Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF) flagship conference uniting adopters and maintainers around Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure—featuring over 35 sessions and keynotes from Googlers including Abdel Sghiouar, Jago Macleod, Tim Hockin, Kaslin Fields, John Belamaric, Dawn Chen, Janet Kuo, Benjamin Elder, Antonio Ojea, Lior Lieberman, Michelle Au, and Braydon Kains across Kubernetes Special Interest Groups (SIGs), etcd, containerd, Gateway API, Common Expression Language (CEL) admission policies, and agent sandboxes, plus the Google-sponsored Community Hub.
• SFSCON (South Tyrol Free Software Conference) 2026 (November 13–14, 2026) — Bolzano, Italy. One of Europe's longest-running Free Software conferences bringing together public-sector decision-makers and developers to advance digital sovereignty and open infrastructure.

🗓️ December 2026

• Yocto Project Virtual Summit 2026.12 (December 1–3, 2026) — Virtual. Community summit for embedded Linux engineers and maintainers building custom, reproducible Linux distributions across edge and Internet of Things (IoT) hardware.
• Open Source Summit Japan 2026 (December 7–9, 2026) — Tokyo, Japan. The Linux Foundation's premier Asia-Pacific conference connecting open source developers, kernel maintainers, and enterprise leaders across cloud, embedded Linux, and open AI, including sessions from Google engineers such as Anurag Sinha.
• Open Compliance Summit 2026 (December 10–11, 2026) — Tokyo, Japan. Specialized gathering uniting legal, security, and Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) practitioners around OpenChain, Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX), software bills of materials (SBOMs), and global open source supply-chain compliance.

Open Source Reads and Links

• [Blog] Open Enables a Lot: The OSI at UNGA81 — At the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA81), the Open Source Initiative (OSI) hosted a panel featuring Google OSPO’s Amanda Casari alongside policy and academic leaders to explore how open source reshapes public infrastructure. Framed by Duane O’Brien’s takeaway that “open by itself does very little, but enables a lot,” what shared scaffolding is needed to turn open licenses into real public value?
• [Paper] “AI Slop is DDoSing Open Source”: Understanding the Impact of AI-Generated Contributions on Open Source Sustainability — After hearing questions about AI-generated pull requests online and at conferences for a while now, I came to Google and Oregon State University’s study of 294 repositories looking for what solutions are actually working. Surveying 11 remediation strategies as first-time contributor merge rates drop 18.18%, how can communities filter synthetic noise without closing the door on newcomers?
• [Article] Who’s Writing Open Source Code? — Have AI coding agents actually taken over open source repositories, or is human authorship still the norm? Auditing 24,000 commits across 15 critical C infrastructure projects from the first half of 2026, RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady finds that fewer than 1% carry explicit machine co-author or agent markers—raising a pressing question: how should open source communities build cultural norms around provenance transparency?
• [Article] The copyright problem with AI-generated code — In creative circles online, people often argue that prompting AI makes you closer to an art patron or a music producer than the artist—but I had never thought about the copyright realities for software. Since open source licenses rely on human copyright, FreeDOS founder Jim Hall asks a foundational question: can you even license code you didn’t actually author?
• [Blog] Launching an opt-in vulnerability-finding service for open-source software — Inspired by Google’s OSS-Fuzz, Anthropic’s new opt-in OSS Scanner offers open source maintainers free, periodic security audits complete with test reproducers and suggested patches running in isolated Docker environments. Giving resource-constrained projects direct access to frontier vulnerability detection is a welcome step forward—how can we keep expanding shared security tooling to help upstream maintainers catch complex bugs early?
• [Blog] Do Agent Skills Help? I Ran 72 Trials to Find Out — Evaluating whether AI agent skills beat prompt-and-guess baselines, Karl Weinmeister ran 72 sandboxed trials across 12 scenarios using Harbor and SkillEvaluator—complementing Google’s open source skill-reach suite for catching description collisions across harnesses like AAIF’s Goose and Claude Code. Together, they raise a practical question for maintainers: how do we test both skill discovery and execution quality?
• [Blog] Make the PDS Your Own: Customization and Metrics — The Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol) is one of my major interests right now, so seeing how people are making its foundations work in practice is fascinating. The latest Reference Personal Data Server (PDS) release adds custom OAuth login branding, 300MB video blobs, and direct-to-Prometheus OpenTelemetry metrics in under 1GB of RAM—what other operational building blocks will help small teams self-host federated infrastructure?
• [Article] Google’s new 4B Gemma model cuts speaker-labelling errors on all four benchmarks, two barely — Automated transcripts still struggle when speakers talk over one another in meetings and interviews. Built on Google’s Gemma 4 E4B and open source DiarizationLM framework, the community-trained Apache 2.0 DiarizationLM-Gemma-4-E4B-v1 approaches speaker diarization as a lightweight post-processing pass over existing transcripts—beating an 8B Llama 3 baseline at half the size. Where can compact local models clean up brittle pipeline handoffs in your own workflows?
• [Blog] Open-Source Voice AI runs entirely on ESP32-S3 — Some of the most inspiring moments in open source come from individual builders experimenting at the edges of hardware constraints. Anankush Pandit’s GNU General Public License (GPL) Ivy AI packs wake-word detection, speech recognition, a 4-bit language model, and speech synthesis onto an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with just 8MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM)—making us wonder what other everyday devices could run entirely offline?

Which of these stories will you be chatting about at your next meetup or conference? Let us know! Share with us on our @GoogleOSS X account or our @opensource.google Bluesky account.

This Week in Open Source for October 15, 2026

by Daryl Ducharme, Open Source Programs Office

This Week in Open Source for October 15, 2026

A look around the world of open source

After speaking about the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Toronto last week (which I recapped in Tag-Team Transmission), open agent boundaries were clearly still on my mind while collecting this week's reads. As AI agents, terminal tools, and embedded micro-apps move deeper into everyday software workflows, a central tension keeps surfacing across the open source community: where do human judgment, interface trust, and maintainer sustainability fit in? Whether teams are wiring up open protocols in the Unix shell, running multimodal retrieval locally on a laptop, or stewarding decades-old kernel infrastructure, the healthiest open source architectures don't replace human agency—they give workers clearer boundaries, inspectable tools, and a genuine seat at the controls.

Upcoming Events

🗓️ October 2026

• All Things Open 2026 (October 19–20, 2026) — Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. One of the largest community-focused open source conferences on the U.S. East Coast exploring open source software, AI engineering, and maintainer sustainability—featuring Googlers Andrew Brogdon, Mark Techson, and Marc Dougherty speaking on "Where Is My Futuristic App? Generative UI and the Open Future" and Abdel Sghiouar on "Taming Agentic AI: How to Run Agents-Generated Code Safely on Kubernetes", alongside the Google Community Lounge with the Flutter team.
• PyTorch Conference North America 2026 (October 20–21, 2026) — San Jose, California, USA. Two days of open source machine learning innovation across the PyTorch ecosystem—featuring a keynote by Google's Bill Jia ("Workload Fungibility in the Age of Agents") and technical sessions from Googlers Chris Jones, Sandeep Pokkunuri, Rob Mulla, Ankita Luthra, Trinadh Kotturu, Claudio Basile, Qi Zhou, Jago Macleod, and Aleksey Vlasenko on TorchTPU, vLLM, SGLang, Ray, and Kubernetes.
• AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026 (October 22–23, 2026) — San Jose, California, USA. Linux Foundation and Agentic AI Foundation conference focused on building and scaling production agentic systems with open standards—featuring keynotes by Google's Sarah Drasner and Chi Wang, plus sessions from Googlers Alan Blount (on A2UI), Junjie Bu (on interoperable agent discovery), Amit Handa (on agentic commerce), Dominic Farolino (on MCP Apps + WebMCP), and Prerna Kakkar & Kurtis Van Gent (on EvalBench).
• GitHub Universe 2026 (October 28–29, 2026) — San Francisco, California, USA & Virtual. Annual global developer gathering highlighting open source workflows, collaborative security, and multi-model AI-assisted software engineering.

🗓️ November 2026

• Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF) New York (November 4–5, 2026) — New York, New York, USA. Dedicated industry conference examining open source compliance, supply-chain security, and collaborative innovation across regulated financial institutions.
• SeaGL (Seattle GNU/Linux Conference) 2026 (November 6–7, 2026) — Seattle, Washington, USA & Virtual. Free, grassroots technical summit dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge of free and open source software, hardware, and culture.
• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 (November 9–12, 2026) — Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation's flagship conference uniting adopters and maintainers around Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure—featuring over 35 sessions and keynotes from Googlers including Abdel Sghiouar, Jago Macleod, Tim Hockin, Kaslin Fields, John Belamaric, Dawn Chen, Janet Kuo, Benjamin Elder, Antonio Ojea, Lior Lieberman, Michelle Au, and Braydon Kains across Kubernetes SIGs, etcd, containerd, Gateway API, CEL admission policies, and agent sandboxes.
• SFSCON (South Tyrol Free Software Conference) 2026 (November 13–14, 2026) — Bolzano, Italy. One of Europe's longest-running Free Software conferences bringing together public-sector decision-makers and developers to advance digital sovereignty and open infrastructure.

🗓️ December 2026

• Yocto Project Virtual Summit 2026.12 (December 1–3, 2026) — Virtual. Community summit for embedded Linux engineers and maintainers building custom, reproducible Linux distributions across edge and IoT hardware.
• Open Source Summit Japan 2026 (December 7–9, 2026) — Tokyo, Japan. The Linux Foundation's premier Asia-Pacific conference connecting open source developers, kernel maintainers, and enterprise leaders across cloud, embedded Linux, and open AI, including sessions from Google engineers such as Anurag Sinha.
• OpenCompliance Summit 2026 (December 10–11, 2026) — Tokyo, Japan. Specialized gathering uniting legal, security, and OSPO practitioners around OpenChain, SPDX, software bills of materials (SBOMs), and global open source supply-chain compliance.

Open Source Reads and Links

• [Blog] Meet the A2A CLI: discover, message, and manage agents from your terminal — In Developer Relations, few things beat showing a protocol live in a terminal during a conference talk without a complex web stack in the way. The new Apache 2.0 A2A CLI lets you discover, message, and wrap any stdin/stdout script into a streaming Agent2Agent server with --exec—raising an interesting question: does meeting developers in the Unix shell matter more for open protocol adoption than heavy SDKs?
• [Blog] Talking to Agents with a2a (as a human!) — Right after the MCP Dev Summit in Toronto, Marc Dougherty shared a post that uncovered even more about the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol by flipping the lens from autonomous systems to human-to-agent interfaces with A2UI. Building a2term so agents render interactive terminal confirmation forms before acting raises a compelling question: could open agent protocols also save humans from enterprise UI bloat?
• [Article] Dreamforce 2026 — When major enterprise platforms start telling customers they may never need to log into a web UI again because every workflow is now an API, MCP tool, or CLI command, where does the user interface go? RedMonk's Rachel Stephens examines this shift toward headless software and asks a question every open source protocol builder should ponder: when third-party agents mediate our data and workflows, how well does trust actually travel?
• [Blog] EmbeddingGemma 2: an open, lightweight multimodal embedding model — Moving RAG setups fully on-device opens up real-world possibilities—from kiosks in low-connectivity areas and offline backup systems to hardware that ships with all of its own help and support docs onboard. With Google DeepMind's Apache 2.0 release of EmbeddingGemma 2 fitting multimodal search into 567MB of RAM, what new resilient tools become possible when devices don't need an internet connection to know how they work?
• [Blog] Atproto Web Tile Embeds — Seeing AT Protocol Web Tiles in the wild sparks curiosity about what new publishing patterns become possible when open protocols move beyond text and static images. Nathan Cassell walks through embedding a live, sandboxed 3D Web Tile straight from a personal data server into a blog post—making us wonder what developers might build when interactive micro-apps can travel anywhere without phoning home.
• [Report] Navigating Open Source Governance in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: The 2026 State of OSPOs and Open Source Management — Working in an OSPO myself, seeing how other teams operate is essential for improving how we serve as liaisons between our organizations and the broader open source ecosystem. With the Linux Foundation and TODO Group's 2026 survey finding 79% of AI-involved OSPOs shaping model policy and 69% piloting agentic workflows, how can we ensure enterprise AI governance also supports upstream maintainers?
• [Report] Celebrating 35 Years of Linux: The Open Source Engine Powering Three Decades of Global Innovation and Infrastructure — It is incredible to see the success of the Linux kernel and distributions across enterprise software development—and to ponder how a project from the early 1990s has kept up with so many technological shifts. As Linux Foundation Research celebrates 35 years of Linux across billions of devices and every top-500 supercomputer, how can the community's model of continuous adaptation guide the next generation of maintainers?

Which of these stories will you be chatting about at your next meetup or conference? Let us know! Share with us on our @GoogleOSS X account or our @opensource.google Bluesky account.

This Week in Open Source for October 2, 2026

by Daryl Ducharme, Open Source Programs Office

This Week in Open Source for October 2, 2026

A look around the world of open source

As AI becomes part of everyday software development, the most compelling questions in open source are shifting from the models themselves to everything surrounding them. I’m always drawn to how technology affects individuals, and especially the workers who use and maintain it, for better or for worse (I definitely prefer better). That’s why I’m convinced the next phase of open-source AI won’t be won by chasing bigger benchmarks, but by building the open infrastructure, transparent local tooling, and community norms that keep developers and maintainers in control. This week’s reads explore what that looks like in practice.

Upcoming Events

🗓️ October 2026

• ValkeyConf 2026 (October 5, 2026) — Prague, Czechia. Dedicated community conference advancing the open source Valkey in-memory data store, featuring a keynote by Valkey TSC member and Google Cloud engineer Jacob Murphy on open source in-memory data structures and scaling high-performance workloads.
• MCP Dev Summit Toronto (October 5–6, 2026) — Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Dedicated Linux Foundation developer summit advancing the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and open agentic interoperability standards. Join Google OSPO's Daryl Ducharme (that's me!) on Tuesday, October 6 (11:00 AM EDT) for "Tag-Team Transmission: Navigating A2A and MCP for Optimum Orchestration," examining how the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and MCP interoperate across multi-agent architectures.
• Open Source Summit Europe (October 7–9, 2026) — Prague, Czechia. The premier Linux Foundation gathering in Europe celebrating the 35th anniversary of Linux and connecting developers, technologists, and community leaders—including a keynote by Google OSPO's Erin McKean on Docsy and technical documentation for humans and AI agents.
• Community Over Code (October 11–14, 2026) — Glasgow, Scotland. The flagship Apache Software Foundation conference bringing together project maintainers, committers, and users to collaborate on open governance, data architecture, and community-led software development.
• BazelCon 2026 (October 13–15, 2026) — Amsterdam, Netherlands. Annual gathering of the Bazel community uniting build system engineers, maintainers, and ecosystem contributors around fast, reproducible, multi-language software builds.
• All Things Open 2026 (October 19–20, 2026) — Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. One of the largest community-focused open source conferences on the U.S. East Coast exploring open source software, AI engineering, and maintainer sustainability—featuring a Google keynote on Generative UI and the Open Future alongside the Google Community Lounge with the Flutter team.
• PyTorch Conference North America 2026 (October 20–21, 2026) — San Jose, California, USA. Two days of open source machine learning innovation covering training, inference, compiler toolchains, and hardware heterogeneity across the PyTorch ecosystem.
• AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026 (October 22–23, 2026) — San Jose, California, USA. Linux Foundation conference focused on building and scaling production agentic AI systems with open standards, observability, and control, featuring a keynote by Google's Rao Surapaneni.
• GitHub Universe 2026 (October 28–29, 2026) — San Francisco, California, USA & Virtual. Annual global developer gathering highlighting open source workflows, collaborative security, and AI-assisted software engineering.

🗓️ November 2026

• Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF) New York (November 4–5, 2026) — New York, New York, USA. Dedicated industry conference examining open source compliance, supply-chain security, and collaborative innovation across regulated financial institutions.
• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 (November 9–12, 2026) — Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation's flagship conference uniting adopters and maintainers around Kubernetes, platform engineering, and cloud-native infrastructure.
• SFSCON (South Tyrol Free Software Conference) 2026 (November 13–14, 2026) — Bolzano, Italy. One of Europe's longest-running Free Software conferences bringing together public-sector decision-makers and developers to advance digital sovereignty and open infrastructure.

Open Source Reads and Links

• [Article] Mila and Mozilla announce new initiative to build trustworthy open source AI for everyone, with Canadian government support — As a Canadienthusiast, seeing Mozilla and Mila partner with the Canadian government on an open source AI foundation layer immediately grabbed my attention. The crossover of open source and public-sector sovereign systems seems clear on the surface, yet real-world adoption reveals unexpected decisions. How do we make open source and open models useful to governments—is it in the open source infrastructure around them?
• [Article] Google’s open source EnvHarness lets AI agents train against environments that evolve with them — As AI adoption matures, the need for solid infrastructure around AI is becoming more evident. It is nice to see Google Research’s work leading to open source tools like EnvHarness, which adapts training sandboxes to an agent’s failure modes—and raises the question of how our evaluation infrastructure must evolve alongside the agents themselves.
• [Blog] Inside LLM Inference: Every Calculation from Text to Token using Gemma 4 12B — LLM inference often feels like an opaque black box, making Amulya Bhatia’s calculation-by-calculation trace of a token moving through Google’s open source Gemma 4 12B fascinating to ponder. Seeing how hybrid attention bounds memory under the hood prompts a broader question: how differently do we design AI systems when we actually understand the math happening inside the model?
• [Video] 100% Local RAG Without Internet: Qdrant Edge and Google LiteRT — GDE Tarun R Jain pairs Google LiteRT and Gemma 4 with Qdrant Edge to run retrieval-augmented generation 100% offline. It prompts an interesting question for system design: how differently do teams experiment with their knowledge bases when local prototyping is free—and how much of what we default to the cloud could stay on the edge?
• [Post] UISurf: An Operator-Centric Multi-Agent Platform for Observable and Cross-Environment UI Automation — UISurf explores orchestrating UI agents across Web, Desktop, and Mobile boundaries using the open Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol. Beyond the tool itself, its lessons on sandboxing and human-in-the-loop oversight are worth pondering: when autonomous agents coordinate across environments, what level of observability do human operators actually need to stay in control?
• [Article] PS5 Linux lead quits as open-source projects have become “a bunch of noobs using LLMs” that “they don’t even understand” — When maintainers leave high-profile projects like PS5 Linux, it is important to look at the reasons. In the age of AI-assisted software development, unvetted LLM code and shifting bounty incentives are straining both maintainers and community trust. What can we learn from these events as we update open source and AI governance best practices to keep projects safe, secure, and viable?

Which of these stories will you be chatting about at your next meetup or conference? Let us know! Share with us on our @GoogleOSS X account or our @opensource.google Bluesky account.

This Week in Open Source for September 24, 2026

by Daryl Ducharme, Open Source Programs Office

This Week in Open Source for September 24, 2026

A look around the world of open source

Open source underpins an $8.8 trillion global economy, yet sustaining it requires moving beyond voluntary charity and philosophical appeals. This week’s reads examine how the ecosystem is adapting to modern economic and AI pressures—from proposing package-registry royalties and quantifying 2–5x net value for regulated utility grids, to turning autonomous AI security incidents into hardened supply-chain defenses that empower open-science breakthroughs like NASA and IBM’s Lunar Foundation Model.

Upcoming Events

🗓️ October 2026

• MCP Dev Summit Toronto (October 5–6, 2026) — Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Dedicated Linux Foundation developer summit advancing the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and open agentic interoperability standards. Join Google OSPO's Daryl Ducharme on October 6 for "Tag-Team Transmission: Navigating A2A and MCP for Optimum Orchestration," examining how the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and MCP interoperate across multi-agent architectures.
• Open Source Summit Europe (October 7–9, 2026) — Prague, Czechia. The premier Linux Foundation gathering in Europe celebrating the 35th anniversary of Linux and connecting developers, technologists, and community leaders across open AI, embedded systems, and digital trust.
• Community Over Code (October 11–14, 2026) — Glasgow, Scotland. The flagship Apache Software Foundation conference bringing together project maintainers, committers, and users to collaborate on open governance, data architecture, and community-led software development.
• All Things Open 2026 (October 19–20, 2026) — Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. One of the largest community-focused open source conferences on the U.S. East Coast exploring open source software, AI engineering, DevSecOps, and maintainer sustainability.
• GitHub Universe 2026 (October 28–29, 2026) — San Francisco, California, USA & Virtual. Annual global developer gathering highlighting open source workflows, collaborative security, and AI-assisted software engineering.

🗓️ November 2026

• Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF) New York (November 4–5, 2026) — New York, New York, USA. Dedicated industry conference examining open source compliance, supply-chain security, and collaborative innovation across regulated financial institutions.
• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 (November 9–12, 2026) — Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation's flagship conference uniting adopters and maintainers around Kubernetes, platform engineering, and modern cloud infrastructure.
• SFSCON (South Tyrol Free Software Conference) 2026 (November 13–14, 2026) — Bolzano, Italy. One of Europe's longest-running Free Software conferences bringing together public-sector decision-makers and developers to advance digital sovereignty and open infrastructure.

Open Source Reads and Links

• [Blog] Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to. — Companies already spend over $1 billion a year on open source, but that money goes to supply-chain mirror and security vendors rather than the maintainers writing the code. Laurie Voss breaks down why voluntary charity and license changes always fail, arguing that commercial package registries and mirror vendors should pay automatic royalties down the dependency tree to long-tail maintainers.
• [Article] AI Is reshaping open source software and straining the systems that sustain it — As conversations grow around moderating the speed of AI development across the industry, it is critical to watch the friction points where AI and open source overlap—particularly as an influx of AI-generated code and vulnerability discovery strains maintainers of an $8.8 trillion ecosystem. Funding remains front and center, requiring not just raw capital but continuous monitoring for effectiveness in sustaining the human governance, consensus-building, and non-coding infrastructure that AI cannot replace.
• [Report] LF Energy Research Finds Open Source Software Can Deliver 2-5x Greater Net Value for Grid Operators — While open source software and public utilities seem like natural philosophical allies as public goods, philosophical appeals routinely fail in regulated infrastructure sectors where operators are bound by strict reliability mandates and ratepayer accountability. This new LF Energy report demonstrates how to bridge that gap: by translating collaborative "make together" governance into an auditable benefit-cost framework showing two to five times greater net value over proprietary procurement.
• [Article] AI Is at a Turning Point — High-profile incidents of autonomous AI agents breaching Hugging Face or social-engineering open source maintainers inevitably dominate headlines and amplify purely negative narratives around AI. However, treating these security failures as concrete post-mortems—exposing how standard reinforcement learning incentivizes deceptive subgoals—is exactly what allows open source communities to establish hardened supply-chain defenses and safely advance high-impact, positive AI use cases.
• [Article] IBM and NASA Release Open-Source AI Model to Support Lunar Exploration — Seeing open source, AI, open data, and space science converge is genuinely inspiring, especially when it demonstrates that open scientific models are only as useful as the open datasets beneath them. While NASA and JAXA planetary archives have long been public, IBM and NASA's release of the Lunar Foundation Model alongside the first harmonized, machine-learning-ready lunar dataset (unifying 30+ multi-instrument layers) proves that transforming raw open data into shared, interoperable infrastructure is what unlocks domain discovery.

Which of these stories will you be chatting about at your next meetup or conference? Let us know! Share with us on our @GoogleOSS X account or our @opensource.google Bluesky account.

This Week in Open Source for July 16, 2026

by Daryl Ducharme, Open Source Programs Office

This Week in Open Source for July 16, 2026

A look around the world of open source

We’re diving into another week of open source news and discussions. As the ecosystem continues to evolve, we're seeing more conversations around the intersection of AI workflows, security at scale, and the infrastructure that supports the open web.

This week, we’re highlighting a few "Open Source Reads" that tackle some of the biggest questions facing our ecosystem today—from the complex ethics of AI-generated workflows to the future of federated social networks. We hope these links provide valuable context as we work together to sustain the critical infrastructure we all rely on.

Upcoming Events

• ASWF Open Source Days (July 19–20) — Los Angeles, CA. Hosted by the Academy Software Foundation, focusing on open source software in visual effects (VFX) and animation.
• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan 2026 (July 28–30) — Yokohama, Japan. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation's flagship conference in Japan.
• Black Hat & DEF CON 2026 (August 1–9) — Las Vegas, NV. While primarily cybersecurity, both heavily feature open source hacking tools. The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) also has a major presence here.
• FOSSY (August 6–9) — Vancouver, Canada. A highly community-focused open source conference emphasizing grassroots participation and collaboration.
• Community over Code Asia (August 7–9) — Beijing, China. The Asian edition of the Apache Software Foundation's (ASF) community-first conference.
• Open Source Summit Korea (August 11–12) — Seoul, South Korea. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, bringing together open source maintainers and enterprises.
• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China (September 7–9) — Shanghai, China. A massive collaborative mega-event uniting open infrastructure, cloud, and AI communities.
• OSPOlogy + OSPO Summit (September 7) — Shanghai, China. Focused on Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs), governance, and corporate open source sustainability.

Open Source Reads and Links

• [Blog] Elephants, Goldfish and the New Golden Age of Software Engineering - This isn't directly open source, but with the open source ecosystem trying to find good AI workflows I thought the Elephant-Goldfish model was an interesting take. It makes the distinction between using AI as a toy and using it as a tool.
• [Article] Open-source AI and the Choice Before Us - The communities with minimal influence on AI development will likely be the most affected by it. This article looks at how strong rules and institutions are needed to guide AI's safe and fair use. The future of AI depends on whether we build systems that include everyone or just deepen existing divides.
• [Article] Open source carries the world. Patching it at Mythos-scale can't fall to maintainers alone. - The past year has shown that AI is speeding up the discovery of vulnerabilities in open source software. Endor Labs is offering a solution to utilize AI to create patching stop gaps for users of the libraries so that maintainers and contributors have the time to create good quality fixes to these vulnerabilities.
• [Blog] The AT-URI Syntax Mess - I am very excited about the open social web, especially things happening around the AT protocol. Early misunderstanding led to the current AT URI syntax being invalid. This article looks at the possible ways forward.
• [Article] The Open Social Web Needs Section 230 to Survive - The open web has always been a promise of free speech. When walled garden social media got involved it created some questions around whether free speech applies to the content served by the corporations running those networks. However, the open social web is not run by corporations. It can be, and it can also be run by individuals federating instances or running their own PDS. So, how do we maintain the free speech promise of the internet with this in mind?

Which of these stories will you be chatting about at your next meetup or conference? Let us know! Share with us on our @GoogleOSS X account or our @opensource.google Bluesky account.

This Week in Open Source #15

by Daryl Ducharme, Google Open Source

This Week in Open Source for February 20th, 2026

A look around the world of open source

We're preparing for a busy conference season, with events like SCALE 23x and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe on the horizon. A core part of our mission is "learning and sharing what we learn" so that our communities can continue to thrive together. Conferences are a great place to fulfill that mission.

This week, we're highlighting a few "Open Source Reads" that tackle some of the biggest questions facing our ecosystem today—from the complex ethics of AI-generated content to the global impact of open AI models. We hope these links provide valuable context as we work together to sustain the critical infrastructure we all rely on.

Upcoming Events

• February 24 - 25: The Linux Foundation Member Summit is happening in Napa, California. It is the annual gathering for Linux Foundation members that fosters collaboration, innovation, and partnerships among the leading projects and organizations working to drive digital transformation with open source technologies.
• March 5 - 8: SCALE 23x is happening in Pasadena, California. It is North America's largest community-run open source conference and includes four days of sessions, workshops, and community activities focused on open source, security, DevOps, cloud native, and more.
• March 9 - 10: FOSSASIA Summit 2026 is happening in Bangkok, Thailand. It will be a two-day hybrid event that showcases the latest in open technologies, fostering collaboration across enterprises, developers, educators, and communities.
• March 16 - 17: FOSS Backstage is happening in Berlin, Germany. This conference brings together the brightest minds in the industry to discuss and explore all about FOSS community, management and compliance.
• March 22: Maintainer Summit EU is happening just before CloudNativeCon in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This is an exclusive event for the people behind our projects to gather face-to-face, collaborate, and celebrate cloud first projects.
• March 23 - 26: Kubecon + CloudNativeCon Europe is happening in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This is the flagship conference for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and brings together adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud first communities.
• March 26 - 29: ATmosphereConf is happening in Vancouver, British Columbia. This conference from the AT Protocol Community took a 2 day conference then booked the venue for the two days prior (March 26th & 27th) with smaller theaters and break out rooms for everything from extended events to developer training to building together.
• April 7 - 8: PyTorch Conference EU is happening in Paris, France. Hosted by the PyTorch Foundation, this conference gathers top-tier AI pioneers, researchers, and developers to explore the future of AI.

Open Source Reads and Links

• [Blog] An AI Agent wrote a hit piece on me - An AI agent wrote a harmful article about a maintainer after he rejected its code for a popular Python library. This shows a new risk where AI can attack people to get what it wants. We must be careful as AI misbehavior can hurt reputations and trust in software. This was followed by a part 2 after more things happened.
• [Blog] Stop closing the door; fix the house - A different take on the crossover between AI and open source. Instead of closing contributions due to poor AI generated code, maintainers should guide contributors and AI tools with clear rules and automation. This helps keep quality high and keeps the community open.
• [Article] Everyone uses open source, but patching moves too slowly - "Maintenance is the highest form of creation." Open source requires maintenance, especially when 60% of security incidents hit unpatched code. How can we work together to keep our communities healthy and secure?
• [Paper] AI-powered open-source infrastructure for accelerating materials discovery and advanced manufacturing - Gen AI isn't the only type of AI in the game. This paper explains how AI and open-source tools help speed up the discovery of new materials. Through using data, simulations, and machine learning together we can build efficient and sustainable platforms.
• [Blog] AI is destroying open source and it's not even good yet - Here's another post about how maintainers face more work and frustration because AI often makes mistakes and doesn't help fix problems. This growing issue could get worse as AI becomes more widely used without careful oversight. So, what types of conversations should we be having to create that oversight?
• [Article] What's next for Chinese open source AI? - Chinese companies are creating and sharing powerful open AI models that anyone can use and modify. Because these models are cheaper and widely adopted globally, they challenge the western AI models. This open approach is changing how AI innovation happens and who controls its future.

Which of these stories will you be chatting about at your next meetup or conference? Let us know! Share with us on our @GoogleOSS X account or our @opensource.google Bluesky account.

This Week in Open Source #14

by Daryl Ducharme & amanda casari, Google Open Source

This Week in Open Source for February 06, 2026

A look around the world of open source

Here we are at the beginning of February, and the world of open source is navigating a fascinating landscape of innovation and challenge. The main focus of many articles this week is on the evolving relationship between AI and software maintenance. But open source is about more than just the code; it's about the people and the spirit of collaboration. With that we look at the Open Gaming Collective which is pushing Linux gaming further and the SLSA framework and how it is foundational in software security.

Dive in to see what's happening this week in open source!

Upcoming Events

• February 24 - 25: The Linux Foundation Member Summit is happening in Napa, California. It is the annual gathering for Linux Foundation members that fosters collaboration, innovation, and partnerships among the leading projects and organizations working to drive digital transformation with open source technologies.
• March 5 - 8: SCALE 23x is happening in Pasadena, California. It is North America's largest community-run open source conference and includes four days of sessions, workshops, and community activities focused on open source, security, DevOps, cloud native, and more.
• March 9 - 10: FOSSASIA Summit 2026 is happening in Bangkok, Thailand. It will be a two-day hybrid event that showcases the latest in open technologies, fostering collaboration across enterprises, developers, educators, and communities.

Open Source Reads and Links

• [Article] Curl shutters bug bounty program to remove incentive for submitting AI slop - The maintainer of popular open-source data transfer tool cURL has ended the project's bug bounty program after maintainers struggled to assess a flood of AI-generated contributions.
• [Article] Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source Software, Researchers Argue - So much open source software is utilized when people vibe code with LLMs. However, vibe coders don't give back, according to research. What can be done to make vibe coders understand the importance of the open source ecosystem and giving back?
• [Blog] AI Slopageddon and the OSS Maintainers - AI-generated low-quality code, called "AI slop," is overwhelming open source maintainers and harming collaboration. Some projects have banned AI contributions, while others require disclosure and careful review to manage the problem. How can we make changes when platforms benefit from AI tools but often ignore the burden this puts on maintainers?
• [Paper] Will It Survive? Deciphering the Fate of AI-Generated Code in Open Source - AI-generated code lasts longer in open-source projects than human-written code. It is changed less often but has more bug fixes and security updates. Predicting when AI code will be modified is hard because many outside factors affect it.
• [Article] Open Gaming Collective (OGC) formed to push Linux gaming even further - On the fun side of open source the Open Gaming Collective is a new group uniting many Linux gaming projects to work together. They will share important tools and kernel patches to make Linux gaming better and less fragmented. Bazzite and other members will use OGC's shared improvements for better hardware support and gaming experience.
• [Blog] Supply Chain Robots, Electric Sheep, and SLSA - Securing the software supply chain is crucial to protect against attacks that can compromise code and build systems. SLSA is a practical framework that helps organizations improve supply chain security step-by-step by verifying source code and build integrity. A good read to understand this aspect of software security.

As we like to say, "a community is a garden, not a building; it requires tending, not just construction".

How is your team tending to your open source "garden" this month? We'd love to hear your stories! Share them on our @GoogleOSS X account or our @opensource.google Bluesky account.

This Week in Open Source #13

by Daryl Ducharme, Google Open Source

This Week in Open Source for January 23, 2026

A look around the world of open source

Can you believe we're already wrapping up the first month of the year? January is coming to a close. The open source ecosystem is buzzing with activity, from the upcoming community gatherings at FOSDEM in Brussels to new conversations around AI standards and cloud flexibility.

Google Open Source believes that "a community is a garden, not a building". It requires constant tending to thrive. This week, we're looking at how we can all contribute to that growth—whether it's by securing the software supply chain, standardizing AI agents, or simply learning from the legends of our field like Linus Torvalds.

Dive in to see what's happening this week in open source!

Upcoming Events

• January 29: CHAOSScon Europe 2026 is co-located with FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. This conference revolves around discussing open source project health, CHAOSS updates, use cases, and hands-on workshops for developers, community managers, project managers, and anyone interested in measuring open source project health. It also shares insights from the CHAOSS context working groups including OSPOs, University Open Source, and Open Source in Science and Research.
• January 31 - February 1: FOSDEM 2026 is happening at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. It is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.
• February 24 - 25: The Linux Foundation Member Summit is happening in Napa, California. It is the annual gathering for Linux Foundation members that fosters collaboration, innovation, and partnerships among the leading projects and organizations working to drive digital transformation with open source technologies.
• March 5 - 8: SCALE 23x is happening in Pasadena, California. It is North America's largest community-run open source conference and includes four days of sessions, workshops, and community activities focused on open source, security, DevOps, cloud native, and more.
• March 9 - 10: FOSSASIA Summit 2026 is happening in Bangkok, Thailand. It will be a two-day hybrid event that showcases the latest in open technologies, fostering collaboration across enterprises, developers, educators, and communities.

Open Source Reads and Links

• [Article] The state of trusted open source - This review of the state of trusted open source report goes over many statistics. One of the interesting ones is that vulnerabilities most often hide in the smaller dependencies of the larger projects we might be focused on. What does this mean for your approach to security? How should various open source communities deal with this?
• [Blog] Software Heritage Archive recognized as a digital public good - As the Software Heritage Archive celebrates its 10th anniversary, the Archive has scaled to protect over 27 billion unique source files, even solving the "2PB problem" by deploying protocols that compressed 78TB of graph data into a 3TB research dataset. This ensures that humanity's executable history remains a global commons rather than a proprietary secret, aligning with our belief at Google that Code is for today, Open Source is forever.
• [Blog] Agent Definition Language: The open standard AI agents have been missing - The Agent Definition Language (ADL) creates a clear, shared way to describe AI agents so they work well across different systems. This helps teams understand what agents do, how they behave, and how to govern them safely. As an open and standard, ADL makes AI agents easier to build, review, and share in the open-source community.
• [Blog] AI Agent Engineering in Go with the Google ADK - AI, agents, and the related protocols touch on many open source projects. This post gives you a technical hands on with the Agent Starter Pack. By following it you'll learn how to build, test, and securely deploy a Go AI agent using Google Cloud services.
• [Article] How Kubernetes Broke the AWS Cloud Monopoly - Before Kubernetes, companies felt locked into AWS because of its unique APIs. Kubernetes allowed apps to run on any cloud, giving users more choice and helping other cloud providers grow. This has made multi-cloud the way forward for many enterprises. Are you utilizing a multi-cloud strategy? Has Kubernetes helped you get there?
• [Article] Even Linux Creator Linus Torvalds is Using AI to Code in 2026 - Opinions vary on where and whether AI is useful in various areas. One place that it has shown the greatest benefit is in as a tool for writing code. It seems Linus Torvalds has started to use it to assist with part of his AudioNoise side project. What a good way to find out how best AI can work for oneself. How have you been using AI with your code?

What exciting open source events and news are you hearing about? Let us know on our @GoogleOSS X account or our new @opensource.google Bluesky account.

This Week in Open Source #12

by Daryl Ducharme & amanda casari, Google Open Source

This Week in Open Source for January 9, 2026

A look around the world of open source

Here we are at the beginning of a new year. What will it bring to the open source world? What new projects will be started? What should we be focusing on? What is your open source resolution for 2026? One of ours is to better connect with various open source communities on social media. We've gotten off to a big start by launching an official Google Open Source account on Bluesky. Already, we are enjoying the community there.

Upcoming Events

• January 21 - 23: Everything Open 2026 is happening in Canberra, Australia. Everything Open is a conference focused on open technologies, including Linux, open source software, open hardware and open data, and the communities that surround them. The conference provides technical deep-dives as well as updates from industry leaders and experts on a wide array of topics from these areas.
• January 29: CHAOSScon Europe 2026 is co-located with FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. This conference revolves around discussing open source project health, CHAOSS updates, use cases, and hands-on workshops for developers, community managers, project managers, and anyone interested in measuring open source project health. It also shares insights from the CHAOSS context working groups including OSPOs, University Open Source, and Open Source in Science and Research.
• January 31 - February 1: FOSDEM 2026 is happening at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. It is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.
• February 24 - 25: The Linux Foundation Member Summit is happening in Napa, California. It is the annual gathering for Linux Foundation members that fosters collaboration, innovation, and partnerships among the leading projects and organizations working to drive digital transformation with open source technologies.

Open Source Reads and Links

• [Talk] State of the Source at ATO 2025: State of the "Open" AI - At the end of last year Open Source Initiative gave a summary of Gabriel Toscano's talk at All Things Open. In the talk he discusses how AI models call themselves "open" but often lack the legal or technical freedoms that true open source requires. Analysis of ~20,000 Hugging Face models found Apache 2.0 and MIT are common, but many models have no license or use restrictive custom terms. The study warns that inconsistent labeling and mutable restrictions muddy openness and urges clearer licensing and platform checks.
• [Article] The Reality of Open Source: More Puppies, Less Beer - Bitnami's removal of popular containers last year shows that open source can suddenly change and disrupt users. Organizations must evaluate who funds and maintains each open source component, not just the code. Plan for business continuity, supply-chain visibility, and the ability to fork or replace critical components.
• [Blog] The Open Source Community and U.S. Public Policy - The Open Source Initiative is increasing its U.S. policy work to ensure open source developers are part of technology and AI rulemaking. Since policymakers often lack deep knowledge of open source, the community must explain how shared code differs from deployed systems. Joining groups like the Open Policy Alliance helps nonprofits engage and influence policy.
• [Article] Pebble, the e-ink smartwatch that refuses to die, just went fully open source - Pebble, the e-ink smartwatch with a tumultuous history, is making a move sure to please the DIY enthusiasts that make up the bulk of its fans: Its entire software stack is now fully open source, and key hardware design files are available too.
• [Article] Forget Predictions: Tech Leaders' Actual 2026 Resolutions - We want to know your open source resolutions and perhaps these resolutions from some tech leaders (open source and otherwise) can point you in a direction. Their plans run the gamut of securing and managing AI responsibly, reducing noise in security data, and creating healthier tech habits. The common theme is intentional, measurable change over speculation.
• [Paper] Everything is Context: Agentic File System Abstraction for Context Engineering - GenAI systems may produce inaccurate or misleading outputs due to limited contextual awareness and evolving data sources. Thus mechanisms are needed to govern how persistent knowledge transitions into bounded context in a traceable, verifiable, and human-aware manner, ensuring that human judgment and knowledge are embedded within the system's evolving context for reasoning and evaluation.
  
  The paper proposes using a file-system abstraction based on the open-source AIGNE framework to manage all types of context for generative AI agents. This unified infrastructure makes context persistent, traceable, and governed so agents can read, write, and version memory, tools, and human input.

What exciting open source events and news are you hearing about? Let us know on our @GoogleOSS X account or our new @opensource.google Bluesky account.

This Week in Open Source #11

This Week in Open Source for October 31, 2025

A look around the world of open source

by Daryl Ducharme & amanda casari, Google Open Source

Happy Halloween. Here is your treat in the form of news and events from the world of open source.

Upcoming Events

• November 10 - 13: Kubecon NA is coming to Atlanta, Georgia along with Cloud Native Con. It brings together adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud native communities.
• December 5 - 7: PyLadiesCon is happening online and in multiple languages across many timezones. This event is dedicated to empowerment, learning, and diversity within the Python community!
• December 8-10: Open Source Summit Japan is happening in Tokyo. Open Source Summits are The Linux Foundation's premier event for open source developers and contributors around the world. If you can make it to Japan there are many sessions to learn from.

Open Source Reads and Links

• A new breed of analyzers - AI-powered code analyzers have recently found many real, useful bugs in curl that earlier tools missed. They scanned all source variations without a build and reported high-quality issues like memory leaks and protocol faults. The curl team fixed dozens of them and now works with the reporters to keep improving security.
• A national recognition; but science and open source are bitter victories - Gaël Varoquaux received France's national order of merit for his work in science, open source, and AI. He celebrates how open tools and collective effort changed the world but warns that economic power can turn those tools to harmful ends. He urges building a collective narrative and economic ambition so science and free software serve a better future for our children. (disponible en français aussi)
• If Open Source Stops Being Global, It Stops Being Open - Geopolitics is pushing technology toward national control. Open source preserves sovereignty because code is user-controlled and global. Should governments buy and support global open source? If it stops being global, does it stop being open?
• Vibe Coding Is the New Open Source—in the Worst Way Possible - Developers are using AI-generated "vibe coding" like they used open source, but it can hide insecure or outdated code. AI often produces inconsistent, hard-to-trace code that increases software supply-chain risk. That danger hits small, vulnerable groups hardest and could create widespread security failures.
• New Open Source Tool from Angular Scores Vibe Code Quality - One of the Angular developers took up the challenge [of evaluating the best LLM for Angular] and vibe-coded a prototype tool that could test how well vibe code works with Angular. That early experiment led to the creation of an open source tool that tests LLM-generated code for frontend development considerations, such as following best practices for a framework, using accessibility best practices and identifying security problems. Called Web Codegen Scorer, the tool is designed to test all of these in vibe-coded applications.

What spooky open source events and news are you being haunted by? Let us know on our @GoogleOSS X account. We will share some of the best on our next This Week in Open Source post.

This Week in Open Source #10

This Week in Open Source for 09/19/2025

A look around the world of open source

by Daryl Ducharme & amanda casari, Google Open Source

As we enter the Autumn of 2025, AI is still on the top of everyone's mind in tech and the world of open source is no different. This week we delve into various facets of AI's impact on the open source world, from its presence in the Linux kernel and the need for official policy, to the discussion around copyright in AI and how it affects open source licenses. We also explore ways companies can actively support open source, the challenges federated networks like Mastodon face with age verification laws, and the emerging concept of spec-driven development with AI as a design tool.

Upcoming Events

• September 23 - 27: Nerderarla 2025 is happening in Buenos Aires. It is a 100% free, world-class event in Latin America with high-quality content in science and technology.
• September 29 - 30: Git Merge 2025 celebrates 20 years of Git in Sunnyvale, California.
• October 2 - 3: Monktoberfest is happening in Portland, Maine. The only conference focused on how craft, technology and social come together. It's one of the most unique events in the industry.
• October 12 - 14: All Things Open 2025 is happening in Raleigh, North Carolina. The largest open source / tech / web conference on the U.S. east coast will feature many talks, including some from 4 different Googlers on varying topics — from creating mentorship programs, to security, to kubernetes and how open source already has solutions to your data problems that you may be trying to solve with AI.

Open Source Reads and Links

• [Article] AI is creeping into the Linux kernel - and official policy is needed ASAP - Coverage and larger discussion about genAI tooling and development on the Linux kernel. Kicked off from OSSNA 2025 talk from Sasha Levin.
• [Blog] The copyright crisis in AI that open source can't ignore - Many AI companies have been ignoring copyright to create their AI models. This sets a precedent that could lead to ignoring of open source licenses. What can open source do? There are some AI companies still taking a principled stance. What should they do?
• [Blog] 4 ways your company can support open source right now - Your company not only uses, but relies upon, open source software. Supporting open source software is an investment in your company and can give you a voice in the future of those projects. So here are four lenses to look through for how you can support the software that is supporting your company.
• [Article] Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws - Age verification laws are starting to affect social media use in different locales. For single entities that run social networks, you can create a single solution that is best for your company's values and hopefully your users. What about federated networks of varying sizes? How are they supposed to address these laws? This is both a sign of the problems with federated networks and the importance of them to keep the internet open.
• [Blog] Spec-driven development with AI: Get started with a new open source toolkit - We're moving from "code is the source of truth" to "intent is the source of truth." With AI the specification becomes the source of truth and determines what gets built. Is this a new best practice for using AI as a design tool?

What exciting open source events and news are you hearing about? Let us know on our @GoogleOSS X account.

This Week in Open Source #9

This Week in Open Source for 09/05/2025

A look around the world of open source
by Daryl Ducharme, amanda casari & Shane Glass, Google Open Source

Upcoming Events

• September 5-7: NixCon 2025 is happening in Switzerland. It is the annual conference for the Nix and NixOS community where Nix enthusiasts learn, share, and connect with others.
• September 9: Kubernetes Community Day 2025 SF Bay Area event, the ultimate gathering for cloud native enthusiasts! This full-day event, sponsored by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), is packed with insightful cloud native talks and unparalleled opportunities for community networking.
• September 11 - 14: ASF Community over Code is happening in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is for ASF members, committers, and open source developers from around the world, focusing on Search, Big Data, Internet of Things, Community, Geospatial, Financial Tech, and many other topics. Google Open Source's own Stephanie Taylor will be giving a talk on cultivating contributors through mentorship.
• September 12 - 16: PyCon AU 2025 is happening in Narrm/Melbourne. It is the national conference for the Python programming community, bringing together professional, student and enthusiast developers, sysadmins and operations folk, students, educators, scientists, statisticians, and many others besides, all with a love for working with Python.
• September 23 - 27: Nerderarla 2025 is happening in Buenos Aires. It is a 100% free, world-class event in Latin America with high-quality content in science and technology.
• September 29 - 30: Git Merge 2025 celebrates 20 years of Git in Sunnyvale, California.
• October 2 - 3: Monktoberfest is happening in Portland, Maine. The only conference focused on how craft, technology and social come together. It's one of the most unique events in the industry.

Open Source Reads and Links

• [Blog Post] Gemini CLI comes to Zed - Built to be extensible, the Gemini CLI is showing itself as a boon to developers and contributors are giving it many new features. Open source itself, it is a perfect fit for the open source code editor Zed.
• [Article] Why Morgan Stanley open sourced its app development tool - Compliance and security are huge issues in the financial sector. Even though open source has historically been a hard sell in that sector, Morgan Stanley saw the value in opening up their Common Architecture Language Model (CALM) and a desire for industry-wide standards helped it gain traction.
• [Blog Post] What the EU's Cyber Resilience Act Means for Open Source - During the Open Source Summits in both North America and Europe, there were many discussions about what needs to happen amongst open source maintainers and enterprises with regards to the CRA.
• [Blog Post] The Cyber Resilience Act: A Five Alarm Fire - On paper, the CRA makes sense. The world of software, after all, cannot be built indefinitely on a foundation that includes Munroe's "project thanklessly maintained by a single developer from Nebraska since 2003" as a load bearing component. Change was and is necessary, as are new incentives – and penalties.The question isn't, therefore, whether or not something like the CRA is necessary and inevitable. The question is whether or not the CRA as it is written today is the appropriate tool for the job. And after multiple briefings on the subject, it seems safe to say that the jury is still very much out on that subject.
• [Blog Post] How much energy does Google's AI use? We did the math. - Concerned about the energy use of AI? The open access technical paper titled Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale is available.

What exciting open source events and news are you hearing about? Let us know on our @GoogleOSS X account.