The UN Invites Open Source and UN-invites Google
June 3, 2025
The United Nations is tired of Google’s shenanigans. Google partnered with the United Nations to manage their form submissions, but the organization that acts as a forum for peace and dialogue is tired of Alphabet Inc. It’s Foss News explains where the UN is turning to for help: “UN Ditches Google For Taking Form Submissions, Opts For An Open Source Solution Instead.” The UN won’t be using Google for its form submissions anymore. The organization has switched to open source and will use CryptPad for submission forms.
The United Nations is promoting the adoption of open source initiatives while continuing to secure user data, ensure transparency, and encourage collaboration. CryptPad is a privacy-focused, open source online collaboration office suite that encrypts its content, doesn’t log IP addresses, and includes collaborative documents and other tools.
The United Nations is trying to step away from Big Tech:
“So far, the UN seems to be moving in the correct direction with their UN Open Source Principles initiative, ditching the user data hungry Google Form, and opting for a much more secure and privacy-focused CryptPad.
They’ve already secured the endorsement of sixteen organizations, including notable names like The Document Foundation, Open Source Initiative, Eclipse Foundation, ZenDiS, The Linux Foundation, and The GNOME Foundation.
I sincerely hope the UN continues its push away from proprietary Big Tech solutions in favor of more open, privacy-respecting alternatives, integrating more of their workflow with such tools.” “No Google” would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Today it’s not just thinking; it is de-Googling. And the open source angle. Is this a way to say, “US technology companies seem to be a bit of a problem?”
Whitney Grace, June 3, 2025
Microsoft: Did It Really Fork This Fellow?
May 26, 2025
Just the dinobaby operating without Copilot or its ilk.
Forked doesn’t quite communicate the exact level of frustration Philip Laine experienced while working on a Microsoft project. He details the incident in his post, “Getting Forked By Microsoft.” Laine invented a solution for image scalability without a stateful component and needed minimal operation oversight. He dubbed his project Spegel, made it open source, and was contacted by Microsoft.
Microsoft was pleased with Spegel. Laine worked with Microsoft engineers to implement Spegel into its architecture. Everything went well until Microsoft stopped working with him. He figured the moved onto other projects. Microsoft did move on but the engineers developed their own version of Spegel. They have the grace to thank Laine and in a README file. It gets worse:
"While looking into Peerd, my enthusiasm for understanding different approaches in this problem space quickly diminished. I saw function signatures and comments that looked very familiar, as if I had written them myself. Digging deeper I found test cases referencing Spegel and my previous employer, test cases that have been taken directly from my project. References that are still present to this day. The project is a forked version of Spegel, maintained by Microsoft, but under Microsoft’s MIT license.”
Microsoft plagiarized…no…downright stole Spegel’s base coding from Laine. He, however, published Spegel with Microsoft’s MIT licensing. The MIT licensing means:
“Software released under an MIT license allows for forking and modifications, without any requirement to contribute these changes back. I default to using the MIT license as it is simple and permissive.”
It does require this:
“The license does not allow removing the original license and purport that the code was created by someone else. It looks as if large parts of the project were copied directly from Spegel without any mention of the original source.”
Laine wanted to work with Microsoft and have their engineers contribute to his open source project. He’s dedicated his energy, time, and resources to Spegel and continues to do so without much contribution other than GitHub sponsors and the thanks of its users. Laine is considering changing Spegel’s licensing as it’s the only way to throw a stone at Microsoft.
If true, the pulsing AI machine is a forker.
Whitney Grace, May 26, 2025
Yo, Open Source Cheerleaders: Department of Defense News
May 21, 2025
Add this to the many changes we have recently seen in the federal government: We learn from Tech Radar, “Pentagon Looks to Shake Up ‘Outdated’ Software Procurement, Declares War on Open Source.” As much as we love open-source software, we know it poses certain security risks for sensitive systems. With an initiative dubbed the Software Fast-Track (SWFT), DOD CIO Katherine Arrington aims to overhaul the department’s software acquisition, authorization, and testing processes. The new framework is to be published by the end of July. Writer Craig Hale reports:
“In the memo, Arrington explained the SWFT Framework will define ‘clear’ and ‘specific’ cybersecurity and Supple Chain Risk Management (SCRM) requirements, rigorous software security verification processes, secure information sharing mechanisms and Federal Government-led risk determinations to expedite the cybersecurity authorizations for rapid software adoption. She continued to explain that current systems are best seen as ‘outdated,’ noting that acquisition processes don’t enable the agility that departments need. Arrington also noted that the use of open source software ‘presents a significant and ongoing challenge,’ with a lack of visibility into the origins and security of software code particularly troubling. Malware and partner leaks have already exposed vulnerabilities in DOD systems, with software vulnerabilities among the most popular entry points for attackers.”
Excellent point. We note the DOD seems to have several goals for this initiative. One can only hope security will take precedence over rapid adoption and penny-pinching. We are curious to see how the agency will save money while shifting away from free software.
Cynthia Murrell, May 21, 2025
France And Germany Form Open Source Writing Collaboration
April 30, 2025
Open source software and AI algorithms are a match made in heaven. You can’t say the same thing about France and Germany when it comes to history, but the countries can put aside their differences (occasionally) to advance technology. The French and German governments came together to design Docs.
Docs is described as “Collaborative writing, simplified-collaborate and write in real time, without layout constraints.” I don’t know if the term “layout” refers to a writing software’s formatting or if it means limited to the constraints of writing software. It could mean either of things or something is lost in the literal translation. Ich habe keine Ahnung. Je ne c’est pas.
Docs is built on the Django Rest Framework and Nest.js. It also uses BlockNote.js and Yes (they also sponsor those text editors too). Docs can be self-hosted, has a business friendly license, and welcomes anyone to contribute to its growth either monetarily or via code). Here is what Docs offers as a writing partner:
“Docs offers an intuitive writing experience. Its minimalist interface favors content over layout, while offering the essentials: media import, offline mode and keyboard shortcuts for greater efficiency.”
So far that sounds très magnifique and ausgezeichnet! Docs also offers simple real-time collaboration. Users on a document can access the same document, see changes made live, and maintain control of the document for data security. Docs also has universal formats for exportation: OpenDocument, Word, and PDF.
A nifty feature unavailable with most writing software is the ability to organize documents into knowledge bases with subpages. This feature also comes with search and pinning capabilities.
This French and German writing collaboration sounds amazing! Break out the champagne and beer and enjoy some croissants and pretzels. This is one open source tool everyone needs!
Whitney Grace, April 30, 2025
Sam Altman: The Waffling Man
February 17, 2025
Another dinobaby commentary. No smart software required.
Chaos is good. Flexibility is good. AI is good. Sam Altman, whom I reference as “Sam AI-Man” has some explaining to do. OpenAI is a consumer of cash. The Chinese PR push suggests that Deepseek has found a way to do OpenAI-type computing like Shein and Temu do gym clothes.
I noted “Sam Altman Admits OpenAI Was On the Wrong Side of History in Open Source Debate.” The write up does not come out state, “OpenAI was stupid when it embraced proprietary software’s approach” to meeting user needs. To be frank, Sam AI-Man was not particularly clear either.
The write up says that Sam AI-Man said:
“Yes, we are discussing [releasing model weights],” Altman wrote. “I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open source strategy.” He noted that not everyone at OpenAI shares his view and it isn’t the company’s current highest priority. The statement represents a remarkable departure from OpenAI’s increasingly proprietary approach in recent years, which has drawn criticism from some AI researchers and former allies, most notably Elon Musk, who is suing the company for allegedly betraying its original open source mission.
My view is that Sam AI-Man wants to emulate other super techno leaders and get whatever he wants. Not surprisingly, other super techno leaders have their own ideas. I would suggest that the objective of these AI jousts is power, control, and money.
“What about the users?” a faint voice asks. “And the investors?” another bold soul queries.
Who?
Stephen E Arnold, February 17, 2025
China Smart, US Dumb: LLMs Bad, MoEs Good
November 21, 2024
Okay, an “MoE” is an alternative to LLMs. An “MoE” is a mixture of experts. An LLM is a one-trick pony starting to wheeze.
Google, Apple, Amazon, GitHub, OpenAI, Facebook, and other organizations are at the top of the list when people think about AI innovations. We forget about other countries and universities experimenting with the technology. Tencent is a China-based technology conglomerate located in Shenzhen and it’s the world’s largest video game company with equity investments are considered. Tencent is also the developer of Hunyuan-Large, the world’s largest MoE.
According to Tencent, LLMs (large language models) are things of the past. LLMs served their purpose to advance AI technology, but Tencent realized that it was necessary to optimize resource consumption while simultaneously maintaining high performance. That’s when the company turned to the next evolution of LLMs or MoE, mixture of experts models.
Cornell University’s open-access science archive posted this paper on the MoE: “Hunyuan-Large: An Open-Source MoE Model With 52 Billion Activated Parameters By Tencent” and the abstract explains it is a doozy of a model:
In this paper, we introduce Hunyuan-Large, which is currently the largest open-source Transformer-based mixture of experts model, with a total of 389 billion parameters and 52 billion activation parameters, capable of handling up to 256K tokens. We conduct a thorough evaluation of Hunyuan-Large’s superior performance across various benchmarks including language understanding and generation, logical reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, coding, long-context, and aggregated tasks, where it outperforms LLama3.1-70B and exhibits comparable performance when compared to the significantly larger LLama3.1-405B model. Key practice of Hunyuan-Large include large-scale synthetic data that is orders larger than in previous literature, a mixed expert routing strategy, a key-value cache compression technique, and an expert-specific learning rate strategy. Additionally, we also investigate the scaling laws and learning rate schedule of mixture of experts models, providing valuable insights and guidance for future model development and optimization. The code and checkpoints of Hunyuan-Large are released to facilitate future innovations and applications.”
Tencent has released Hunyuan-Large as an open source project, so other AI developers can use the technology! The well-known companies will definitely be experimenting with Hunyuan-Large. Is there an ulterior motive? Sure. Money, prestige, and power are at stake in the AI global game.
Whitney Grace, November 21, 2024
Meta and China: Yeah, Unauthorized Use of Llama. Meh
November 8, 2024
This post is the work of a dinobaby. If there is art, accept the reality of our using smart art generators. We view it as a form of amusement.
That open source smart software, you remember, makes everything computer- and information-centric so much better. One open source champion laboring as a marketer told me, “Open source means no more contractual handcuffs, the ability to make changes without a hassle, and evidence of the community.
An AI-powered robot enters a meeting. One savvy executive asks in Chinese, “How are you? Are you here to kill the enemy?” Another executive, seated closer to the gas emitted from a cannister marked with hazardous materials warnings gasps, “I can’t breathe!” Thanks, Midjourney. Good enough.
How did those assertions work for China? If I can believe the “trusted” outputs of the “real” news outfit Reuters, just super cool. “Exclusive: Chinese Researchers Develop AI Model for Military Use on Back of Meta’s Llama”, those engaging folk of the Middle Kingdom:
… have used Meta’s publicly available Llama model to develop an AI tool for potential military applications, according to three academic papers and analysts.
Now that’s community!
The write up wobbles through some words about the alleged Chinese efforts and adds:
Meta has embraced the open release of many of its AI models, including Llama. It imposes restrictions on their use, including a requirement that services with more than 700 million users seek a license from the company. Its terms also prohibit use of the models for “military, warfare, nuclear industries or applications, espionage” and other activities subject to U.S. defense export controls, as well as for the development of weapons and content intended to “incite and promote violence”. However, because Meta’s models are public, the company has limited ways of enforcing those provisions.
In the spirit of such comments as “Senator, thank you for that question,” a Meta (aka Facebook), wizard allegedly said:
“That’s a drop in the ocean compared to most of these models (that) are trained with trillions of tokens so … it really makes me question what do they actually achieve here in terms of different capabilities,” said Joelle Pineau, a vice president of AI Research at Meta and a professor of computer science at McGill University in Canada.
My interpretation of the insight? Hey, that’s okay.
As readers of this blog know, I am not too keen on making certain information public. Unlike some outfits’ essays, Beyond Search tries to address topics without providing information of a sensitive nature. For example, search and retrieval is a hard problem. Big whoop.
But posting what I would term sensitive information as usable software for anyone to download and use strikes me as something which must be considered in a larger context; for example, a bad actor downloading an allegedly harmless penetration testing utility of the Metasploit-ilk. Could a bad actor use these types of software to compromise a commercial or government system? The answer is, “Duh, absolutely.”
Meta’s founder of the super helpful Facebook wants to bring people together. Community. Kumbaya. Sharing.
That has been the lubricant for amassing power, fame, and money… Oh, also a big gold necklace similar to the one’s I saw labeled “Pharaoh jewelry.”
Observations:
- Meta (Facebook) does open source for one reason: To blunt initiatives from its perceived competitors and to position itself to make money.
- Users of Meta’s properties are only data inputters and action points; that is, they are instrumentals.
- Bad actors love that open source software. They download it. They study it. They repurpose it to help the bad actors achieve their goals.
Did Meta include a kill switch in its open source software? Oh, sure. Meta is far-sighted, concerned with misuse of its innovations, and super duper worried about what an adversary of the US might do with that technology. On the bright side, if negotiations are required, the head of Meta (Facebook) allegedly speaks Chinese. Is that a benefit? He could talk with the weaponized robot dispensing biological warfare agents.
Stephen E Arnold, November 8, 2024
Money and Open Source: Unpleasant Taste?
October 23, 2024
Open-source veteran and blogger Armin Ronacher ponders “The Inevitability of Mixing Open Source and Money.” It is lovely when developers work on open-source projects for free out of the goodness of their hearts. However, the truth is these folks can only afford to spend so much time working for free. (A major reason open source documentation is a mess, by the way.)
For his part, Ronacher helped launch Sentry’s Open Source Pledge. That initiative asks companies to pledge funding to open source projects they actively use. It is particularly focused on small projects, like xz, that have a tougher time attracting funds than the big names. He acknowledges the perils of mixing open source and money, as described by Word Press’s David Heinemeier Hansson. But he insists the blend is already baked in. He considers:
“At face value, this suggests that Open Source and money shouldn’t mix, and that the absence of monetary rewards fosters a unique creative process. There’s certainly truth to this, but in reality, Open Source and money often mix quickly. If you look under the cover of many successful Open Source projects you will find companies with their own commercial interests supporting them (eg: Linux via contributors), companies outright leading projects they are also commercializing (eg: MariaDB, redis) or companies funding Open Source projects primarily for marketing / up-sell purposes (uv, next.js, pydantic, …). Even when money doesn’t directly fund an Open Source project, others may still profit from it, yet often those are not the original creators. These dynamics create stresses and moral dilemmas.”
For example, the conflict between Hansson and WP Engine. The tension can also personal stress. Ronacher shares doubts that have plagued him: to monetize or not to monetize? Would a certain project have taken off had he poured his own money into it? He has watched colleagues wrestle with similar questions that affected their health and careers. See his post for more on those issues. The write-up concludes:
“I firmly believe that the current state of Open Source and money is inadequate, and we should strive for a better one. Will the Pledge help? I hope for some projects, but WordPress has shown that we need to drive forward that conversation of money and Open Source regardless of the size of the project.”
Clearly, further discussion is warranted. New ideas from open-source enthusiasts are also needed. Can a balance be found?
Cynthia Murrell, October 23, 2024
Open Source Versus Commercial Software. The Result? A Hybrid Which Neither Parent May Love
September 30, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I have been down the open source trail a couple of times. The journey was pretty crazy because open source was software created to fulfill a computer science class requirement, a way to provide some “here’s what I can do” vibes to a résumé when résumés were anchored to someone’s reality, and “play” that would get code adopted so those in the know could sell services like engineering support, customizing, optimizing, and “making it mostly work.” In this fruit cake, were licenses, VCs, lone-wolves, and a few people creating something useful for a “community” which might or might not “support” the effort. Flip enough open source rocks and one finds some fascinating beasts like IBM, Microsoft, and other giant technology outfits.
Some hybrids work; others do not. Thanks, MSFT Copilot, good enough.
Today I learned their is now a hybrid of open source and proprietary (commercial) software. According to the “Some Startups Are Going Fair Source to Avoid the Pitfalls of Open Source Licensing” states:
The fair source concept is designed to help companies align themselves with the “open” software development sphere, without encroaching into existing licensing landscapes, be that open source, open core, or source-available, and while avoiding any negative associations that exist with “proprietary.” However, fair source is also a response to the growing sense that open source isn’t working out commercially.
Okay. I think “not working out commercially” is “real news” speak for “You can’t make enough money to become a Silicon Type mogul.” The write up adds:
Businesses that have flown the open source flag have mostly retreated to protect their hard work, moving either from fully permissive to a more restrictive “copyleft” license, as the likes of Element did last year and Grafana before it, or ditched open source altogether as HashiCorp did with Terraform.
These are significant developments. What about companies which have built substantial businesses surfing on open source software and have not been giving back in equal measure to the “community”? My hunch is that many start ups use the open source card as a way to get some marketing wind in their tiny sails. Other outfits just cobble together a number of open source software components and assemble a new and revolutionary product. The savings come from the expense of developing an original solution and using open source software to build what becomes a proprietary system. The origins of some software is either ignored by some firms or lost in the haze of employee turnover. After all, who remembers? A number of intelware companies which off specialized services to government agencies incorporate some open source software and use their low profile or operational secrecy to mask what their often expensive products provide to a government entity.
The write up notes:
For now, the main recommended fair source license is the Functional Source License (FSL), which Sentry itself launched last year as a simpler alternative to BUSL. However, BUSL itself has also now been designated fair source, as has another new Sentry-created license called the Fair Core License (FCL), both of which are included to support the needs of different projects. Companies are welcome to submit their own license for consideration, though all fair source licenses should have three core stipulations: It [the code] should be publicly available to read; allow third parties to use, modify, and redistribute with “minimal restrictions“; and have a delayed open source publication (DOSP) stipulation, meaning it converts to a true open source license after a predefined period of time. With Sentry’s FSL license, that period is two years; for BUSL, the default period is four years. The concept of “delaying” publication of source code under a true open source license is a key defining element of a fair source license, separating it from other models such as open core. The DOSP protects a company’s commercial interests in the short term, before the code becomes fully open source.
My reaction is that lawyers will delight in litigating such notions as “minimal restrictions.” The cited article correctly in my opinion says:
Much is open to interpretation and can be “legally fuzzy.”
Is a revolution in software licensing underway?
Some hybrids live; others die.
Stephen E Arnold, September 30, 2024
Open Source Dox Chaos: An Opportunity for AI
September 24, 2024
It is a problem as old as the concept of open source itself. ZDNet laments, “Linux and Open-Source Documentation Is a Mess: Here’s the Solution.” We won’t leave you in suspense. Writer Steven Vaughan-Nichols’ solution is the obvious one—pay people to write and organize good documentation. Less obvious is who will foot the bill. Generous donors? Governments? Corporations with their own agendas? That question is left unanswered.
But there is not doubt. Open-source documentation, when it exists at all, is almost universally bad. Vaughan-Nichols recounts:
“When I was a wet-behind-the-ears Unix user and programmer, the go-to response to any tech question was RTFM, which stands for ‘Read the F… Fine Manual.’ Unfortunately, this hasn’t changed for the Linux and open-source software generations. It’s high time we addressed this issue and brought about positive change. The manuals and almost all the documentation are often outdated, sometimes nearly impossible to read, and sometimes, they don’t even exist.”
Not only are the manuals that have been cobbled together outdated and hard to read, they are often so disorganized it is hard to find what one is looking for. Even when it is there. Somewhere. The post emphasizes:
“It doesn’t help any that kernel documentation consists of ‘thousands of individual documents’ written in isolation rather than a coherent body of documentation. While efforts have been made to organize documents into books for specific readers, the overall documentation still lacks a unified structure. Steve Rostedt, a Google software engineer and Linux kernel developer, would agree. At last year’s Linux Plumbers conference, he said, ‘when he runs into bugs, he can’t find documents describing how things work.’ If someone as senior as Rostedt has trouble, how much luck do you think a novice programmer will have trying to find an answer to a difficult question?”
This problem is no secret in the open-source community. Many feel so strongly about it they spend hours of unpaid time working to address it. Until they just cannot take it anymore. It is easy to get burned out when one is barely making a dent and no one appreciates the effort. At least, not enough to pay for it.
Here at Beyond Search we have a question: Why can’t Microsoft’s vaunted Copilot tackle this information problem? Maybe Copilot cannot do the job?
Cynthia Murrell, September 24, 2024
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