Press mentions

April 28, 2025

National AI Action plan should expand open-source offerings, respondents say

NextGov

Advocacy organizations like the Open Source Initiative offered a strong rationale for building a strong open-source ecosystem in the U.S. “At a time when AI is evolving rapidly, the U.S. government’s AI Action Plan should include Open Source AI as a foundation to ensure as many minds as possible — from startups and researchers to major tech firms — are working to find the next Innovation,” OSI’s comments read. “Driving collaboration through Open Source can bolster the competitiveness of US companies on the world stage.”

April 22, 2025

Open source technology in the age of AI

McKinsey

With more organizations deploying gen AI across business functions, a new survey finds that leaders are increasingly turning to open source AI solutions to build out their tech stacks.

March 14, 2025

‘Open’ model licenses often carry concerning restrictions

TechCrunch

“The current landscape of AI model licensing is riddled with confusion, restrictive terms, and misleading claims of openness,” Vidal said. “Instead of redefining ‘open’ to suit corporate interests, the AI industry should align with established open source principles to create a truly open ecosystem.”

March 11, 2025

The OSI First to Endorse United Nations Open Source Principles

United Nations

The United Nations Open Source United community and the Open Source Initiative (OSI)Opens a new window today announced that the OSI has become the first organization to officially endorse the UN Open Source Principles. The UN Open Source Principles, recently adopted by the UN Chief Executive Board’s Digital Technology Network (DTN)Opens a new window, provide guidelines to drive collaboration and Open Source adoption within the UN and globally.

February 21, 2025

DeepSeek goes beyond “open weights” AI with plans for source code release

Ars Technica

It’s currently unclear whether DeepSeek’s planned open source release will also include the code the team used when training the model. That kind of training code is necessary to meet the Open Source Initiative’s formal definition of “Open Source AI,” which was finalized last year after years of study. A truly open AI also must include “sufficiently detailed information about the data used to train the system so that a skilled person can build a substantially equivalent system,” according to OSI.

February 16, 2025

Open source LLMs hit Europe’s digital sovereignty roadmap

TechCrunch

In traditional software, the perennial struggle between open source and proprietary revolves around the “true” meaning of “open source.” This can be resolved by deferring to the formal “definition” as per the Open Source Initiative, the industry stewards of what are and aren’t legitimate open source licenses. More recently, the OSI has formed a definition of “open source AI”

February 8, 2025

Why the ‘spirit’ of open source means much more than a license

TechCrunch

“The point of having definitions is to have criteria that can be scored, and focusing on licensing is how that is accomplished,” Maffulli said in a statement issued to TechCrunch. “The global community and industry have come to rely on the Open Source Definition and now the Open Source AI Definition as objective measures that they can rely on.”

February 5, 2025

Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to redefine open source so badly

ZDNET

OSI executive director Stefano Maffulli told me. “If only Meta’s license would remove the restrictions, we’d be more in sync. As it stands now, Llama is a liability for any developer; too opaque to be safe to use and with a license that ultimately leaves Meta in charge of their innovations.

February 3, 2025

Red Hat’s take on open-source AI: Pragmatism over utopian dreams

ZDNET

Fontana also warns against overreach in defining openness, advocating for minimal standards rather than utopian ideals. “The Open Source Definition (OSD) worked because it set a floor, not a ceiling. AI definitions should focus on licensing clarity first, not burden developers with impractical transparency mandates.”