Open Source Software Went Nuclear This Ye
  Cade Metz Wired (December 27, 2015)
  Open source software-software freely shared with the world at 
large-is an old idea.  A guy named Richard Stallman started 
preaching the gospel in the early '80s, though he called it free 
software.  Linus Torvalds started work on Linux, the enormously 
successful open source operating system, in 1991, and today, it 
drives our daily lives-literally.  The Android operating system 
that runs so many Google phones is based on Linux.  When you open 
a phone app like Twitter or Facebook and pull down all those 
tweets and status updates, you're tapping into massive computer 
data centers filled with hundreds of Linux machines.  Linux is 
the foundation of the Internet.
  And yet 2015 was the year open source software gained new 
significance, thanks to Apple and Google and Elon Musk.  Now more 
than ever, even the most powerful tech companies and 
entrepreneurs are freely sharing the code underlying their latest 
technologies.  They recognize this will accelerate not only the 
progress of technology as a whole, but their own progress as 
well.  It's altruism with self-interest.  And it's how the tech 
world now works.
  "This is not just a turning point, but a tipping point," says 
Brandon Keepers, the head of open source at GitHub, the online 
service that sits at the heart of the open source universe.
  	Apple Opens Up
  This year, Apple open sourced the Swift programming language-a 
big departure from how it operated before.  For the most part, 
Apple kept the code underpinning its previous language, 
Objective-C, to itself, ensuring that it ran only on Apple 
devices.  By open sourcing Swift, Apple ensures the language can 
run on any device, including machines based on Linux, Android, 
and Microsoft Windows.
  Yes, Apple is allowing its language to run on competing 
devices.  But this is what it must do.  Thanks in large part to 
the proliferation of open source software, the modern world no 
longer runs on a single computing platform the way it did in the 
'90s, following the rise of Microsoft Windows.  If Apple wants to 
keep pace, it must ensure that its coding tools run everywhere.  
That's because the world's software developers must build for all 
the platforms people around the world use.  If Apple's tools only 
work for Apple's platform, developers will be less likely to use 
them.
  Not convinced? Late in 2014, Microsoft came to the same 
conclusion when it open sourced disNET.  For years, disNET was 
merely a way of building software that ran on Windows.  Now that 
it's open source, the wider software community can ensure that 
software built with Microsoft's tools runs on Linux and Apple's 
operating system, too.
  	Open Sourcing Intelligence
  This also was the year Google open sourced TensorFlow, the 
software engine that drives its artificial intelligence services, 
including its image and speech recognition and language 
translation tools.  Over the past 15 years, Google has built a 
wide range of data center technologies that have helped make it 
the most powerful company on the 'net.  These technologies allow 
all of the company's online services to instantly handle requests 
from billions of people, no matter where in the world they may 
be.  Typically, Google kept these technologies to itself, forcing 
others to engineer inferior imitations.  With TensorFlow, Google 
has changed direction, freely sharing a creation that sits at the 
heart of its empire.
  Why? Google realizes how important AI is to its future, and it 
knows that it can accelerate the progress of AI if it shares its 
software.  Google employs many of the world's smartest minds.  
But not all of them.  Those beyond Google can help improve 
TensorFlow-improvements that Google can take advantage of.  
What's more, it provides a means of identifying new talent.  In a 
way, open sourcing TensorFlow helps the company train the 
smartest researchers for a career at Google.
  Certainly, Google isn't giving away all its secrets.  It's 
keeping parts of TensorFlow to itself.  And its not sharing the 
mountains of data that are so essential to training its AI 
services.  But it is sharing enough code to make a 
difference-both for others and for itself.
  	Elon for Everyone
  Elon Musk went even further.  In mid-December, he and Sam 
Altman, president of Y Combinator, unveiled OpenAI, a $1 billion 
nonprofit dedicated to the same breed of AI that Google is 
developing.  They even snagged one of Google's top researchers, 
Ilya Sutskever.  And they've vowed to open source all their work.  
The idea is that by sharing the latest AI tech with everyone, 
they can ensure that no one AI operation becomes too powerful.  
That may sound counterinuitive.  And we're a long way from seeing 
how this plays out.  But if there's one thing we learned in 2015, 
it's that we shouldn't underestimate the power of open source.


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