Lots of open source hasn’t diffused control of the cloud market. If anything, it has concentrated it. With so much open source available, enterprises have needed cloud companies to help them make sense of it all. Enterprises haven’t really cared about the provenance of that open source code, either. After all, the biggest winner in cloud (Amazon Web Services) has, to date, been the smallest contributor to open source, relatively speaking. That has changed in the past few years, with AWS contributing across a swath of projects, from Postgres to OpenTelemetry to Linux. My point isn’t to criticize AWS. Not at all. After all, AWS has done what customers want: made all that open source easily consumable by enterprises, whatever its source.
We can wish that AI will be different, but it’s hard to see how.
The winners in AI
As Richard Waters notes in the Financial Times, “OpenAI’s biggest challenge [is] the lack of deep moats around its business and the intense competition it faces.” That competition isn’t coming from open source. It’s coming from other well-capitalized businesses—from Microsoft, Meta, and Google. One of the biggest issues in AI right now is how much heavy lifting is imposed on the user. Users don’t want or need a bunch of new, open source–enabled options. Rather, they need someone to make AI simpler. Who will deliver that simplicity is still up for discussion, but the answer isn’t going to be “lots of open source vendors,” because, by definition, that would simply exacerbate the complexity that customers want removed.