Even though it Makes Everyone Nervous

The Windows Phone

Open-Source Encryption as Munitions

The internet was largely unencrypted until 1991 when PGP, the first popular open-source encryption, was released and  immediately became the subject of a criminal investigation of “munitions export without a license.” As an alternative, the Clinton Administration proposed the “Clipper Chip”, a proprietary hardware encryption backdoor to be built into all internet devices. Today, no one trusts encryption that is NOT open-source.

The Open-Source Operating System That Runs on Any Hardware

Linux was also invented in 1991, and almost all cloud servers in the world use it. One strength of Linux is that it can run on anything; even Android is a fork of Linux. Microsoft spent billions of dollars trying to driving adoption of Windows on servers or embedded devices, but failed. One reason was the difficulty of porting Windows to different hardware, especially hardware less powerful than PCs. Nevertheless, as of this writing, Facebook – which runs entirely on Linux – bans the discussion of Linux as a “cybersecurity threat”.

Open-Source AI Makes Everyone Nervous

OpenAI which provides very-much-not-open AI, is struggling to maintain its edge over open-source challengers, such as Meta’s Llama. The US Federal Government is lending a hand by limiting the exports of AI and advanced computer chips. DeepSeek, a company in China, just announced an open-source model based on Llama that is as good as OpenAI’s, and requires substantially less powerful hardware to run, up to 50x less GPU usage, depending on whom you believe. Nvidia, who has a near-monopoly on AI GPUs, had a bad day in the stock market when DeepSeek was announced. Once again, open-source software pulled the rug out from under proprietary hardware.

Open-Source Drone Software and Hardware

The Drone Industry today is dominated by proprietary hardware companies. Some even claim to be “autonomous”, but they remain focused on their increasingly commoditized hardware. Many governments are attempting to control the export – or import – of Drones, but building drones is easy, as demonstrated by the scrappy soldiers in Ukraine and elsewhere. But it will be open software – on the drone and in the cloud – that drives innovation in drone technology.