Betting on self-interest
That was the concern I expressed to Whitehurst, much more politely than when he became Red Hat CEO back in 2007, and it’s something the industry must confront. Or maybe not. Open source, for example, has always depended on widespread, ever-evolving corporate self-interest to thrive. At any given time, one company might decide it no longer had anything to gain from contributing to, say, Linux, but at the same time, another company would discover reasons it should start contributing.
Self-interest, it turns out, is one heckuva drug.
I wrote in 2016 that “there’s no money in open source.” That’s still true in 2026, both for open source and open weights. In open weights, the smart money isn’t that any particular company will keep funneling copious quantities of cash into training new, soon-to-be-given-away models. It’s never wise to bet on any particular vendor’s goodwill. Instead, the bet is on the perpetuity of the overall supply of open-weight contributions. Why? Because Meta, Alibaba, DeepSeek, Nvidia, and inference companies all have different businesses that become more valuable when the model layer becomes cheaper and more interchangeable. If Meta becomes more closed, Alibaba still wants cloud consumption. If Alibaba holds back, DeepSeek or Moonshot may want global attention. Nvidia wants chip demand.
