If Open Source Stops Being Global, It Stops Being Open (fossforce.com)

Jos Poortvliet argues in a warning to the AI/ML and broader tech community that rising geopolitical fragmentation—Europe’s “buy European” debates, US pressure against allied regulation, Chinese attempts to slip backdoors into open-source projects, and sanctions that forced Linus Torvalds to bar Russian maintainers—threatens the global nature of open source. He contends that open source is not just code but a governance model that shifts control from vendors and states to users; if projects become nationalized or forked into local variants, the advantages of inspectability, interoperability and collective innovation erode, and vendor lock‑in returns. Technically and economically, Poortvliet stresses why this matters: open standards, copyleft licensing, and global maintainer ecosystems underpin trillions in digital infrastructure value (from phones to clouds to AI). Fragmentation—repeating the early‑2000s mistake of local Linux distributions—duplicates effort, decreases security visibility (more risk of hidden backdoors), and channels public spending back into proprietary vendors. His prescription: governments should use procurement to scale open‑source vendors, support global, diverse governance models, and avoid building isolated “sovereign” stacks. Preserve global collaboration or lose the creativity, security, and sovereignty that only truly open projects can deliver.