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What is open source?

Open source is a term that originally referred to open source software (OSS). Open source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit.

Open source software is developed in a decentralized and collaborative way, relying on peer review and community production. Open source software is often cheaper, more flexible, and has more longevity than its proprietary peers because it is developed by communities rather than a single author or company.

Open source has become a movement and a way of working that reaches beyond software production. The open source movement uses the values and decentralized production model of open source software to find new ways to solve problems in their communities and industries.

How does an open source development model work?

An open source development model is the process used by an open source community project to develop open source software. The software is then released under an open source license, so anyone can view or modify the source code.

Many open source projects are hosted on GitHub , where you can access repositories or get involved in community projects. Linux® , Ansible, and Kubernetes are examples of popular open source projects.

At Red Hat, we use an open source software development model to create our enterprise open source products and solutions. Red Hat developers actively participate in hundreds of open source projects across the IT stack.

We start with community-built open source software that meets the needs, partially or fully, of our customers. Red Hat builds upon these open source projects, hardening security, patching vulnerabilities, and adding new enterprise features.

We then contribute these improvements back to the original project for the benefit of the community as a whole.

As customers use our software, they provide feedback, submit bug reports, and request additional features as their needs shift. This input guides Red Hat's development.

Linux and open source

Linux is a free, open source operating system (OS), released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It’s also become the largest open source software project in the world.

The Linux operating system was created as an alternative, free, open source version of the MINIX operating system, which was itself based on the principles and design of Unix.

Because Linux is released under an open source license, which prevents restrictions on the use of the software, anyone can run, study, modify, and redistribute the source code, or even sell copies of their modified code, as long as they do so under the same license.

What’s the difference between free, closed, and open source software?

For a long time open source software held the earlier label of "free software." The free software movement was formally established by Richard Stallman in 1983 through the GNU Project . The free software movement organized itself around the idea of user freedoms: freedom to see the source code, to modify it, to redistribute it—to make it available and to work for the user in whatever way the user needed it to work.

Free software exists as a counterpart to proprietary or "closed source" software. Closed source software is highly guarded. Only the owners of the source code have the legal right to access that code. Closed source code cannot be legally altered or copied, and the user pays only to use the software as it is intended—they cannot modify it for new uses nor share it with their communities.

The name "free software," however, has caused a lot of confusion. Free software does not necessarily mean free to own, just free to use how you might want to use it. "Free as in freedom, not as in beer" the community has tried to explain. Christine Peterson, who coined the term "open source," tried to address this problem by replacing ‘free software’ with ‘open source’: "The problem with the main earlier label, ‘free software,’ was not its political connotations, but that—to newcomers—its seeming focus on price is distracting. A term was needed that focuses on the key issue of source code and that does not immediately confuse those new to the concept."

Peterson proposed the idea of replacing "free software" with the term "open source" to a working group that was dedicated, in part, to shepherding open source software practices into the broader marketplace. This group wanted the world to know that software was better when it was shared—when it was collaborative, open, and modifiable. That it could be put to new and better uses, was more flexible, cheaper, and could have better longevity without vendor lock-in.

Eric Raymond was one of the members of this working group, and in 1997 he published some of these same arguments in his wildly influential essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" . In 1998, partly in response to that essay, Netscape Communications Corporation open sourced their Mozilla project, releasing the source code as free software. In its open source form, that code later became the foundation for Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

Netscape’s endorsement of open source software placed added pressure on the community to think about how to emphasize the practical business aspects of the free software movement. And so, the split between open source and free software was cemented: "open source" would serve as the term championing the methodological, production, and business aspects of free software. "Free software" would remain as a label for the conversations that emphasized the philosophical aspects of these same issues as they were anchored in the concept of user freedoms.

By early 1998 the Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded, formalizing the term open source and establishing a common, industry-wide definition. Though the open source movement was still met with wariness and corporate suspicion from the late 1990s into the early 2000s, it has steadily moved from the margins of software production to become the industry standard that it is today.

What are the values of open source?

There are lots of reasons why people choose open source over proprietary software, but the most common ones are:

Peer review: Because the source code is freely accessible and the open source community is very active, open source code is actively checked and improved upon by peer programmers. Think of it as living code, rather than code that is closed and becomes stagnant.
Transparency: Need to know exactly what kinds of data are moving where, or what kinds of changes have happened in the code? Open source allows you to check and track that for yourself, without having to rely on vendor promises.
Reliability: Proprietary code relies on the single author or company controlling that code to keep it updated, patched, and working. Open source code outlives its original authors because it is constantly updated through active open source communities. Open standards and peer review ensure that open source code is tested appropriately and often.
Flexibility: Because of its emphasis on modification, you can use open source code to address problems that are unique to your business or community. You aren’t locked in to using the code in any one specific way, and you can rely on community help and peer review when you implement new solutions.
Lower cost: With open source the code itself is free—what you pay for when you use a company like Red Hat is support, security hardening, and help managing interoperability.
No vendor lock-in: Freedom for the user means that you can take your open source code anywhere, and use it for anything, at anytime.
Open collaboration: The existence of active open source communities means that you can find help, resources, and perspectives that reach beyond one interest group or one company.

The open source movement beyond software

Open source is about a lot more than code. At Red Hat, we celebrate what communities are doing with open source technology today with Open Source Stories. Open Source Stories is a multimedia series that celebrates how community, meritocracy, and a free exchange of ideas can unlock potential across a range of disciplines. Check out these recent highlights:

What are the farmers of tomorrow doing with open tools and principles today?
Learn how a teacher and an afterschool club built a creative community through open leadership and transformed a school and a city in the process.
Femi Owolade-Coombes discusses how the power of open source and community can unlock potential for young coders .
Alicia Gibb explains what the open hardware movement is and why it matters.

Why choose Red Hat for open source?

Red Hat is the largest open source company in the world. We build and support open source products from open source projects. We give back to the projects and communities we engage in. We defend open source licenses. With open source, we equip our customers for success. We take community-built code and harden its security, add features, and make it enterprise-ready and scalable. Then we push these improvements back out to the original project to benefit the community as a whole.

Follow your curiosity

Open Source Stories, an original series from Red Hat, celebrates the creators who bring the power of Open Source to everything people do.

Keep reading

What's the difference between fedora and red hat enterprise linux.

Both are operating system technologies, but Fedora is built by an open source community while Red Hat Enterprise Linux is developed by Red Hat with the explicit intent of being used as an enterprise IT platform.

Open source is a term that refers to open source software (OSS). Open source software is code that can been seen, modified, and distributed by anyone.

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A Brief History of Open Source

It’s difficult to imagine a world without open source. Open source is ubiquitous. In fact, open source is what powers the internet.

For example, 60% of the world’s websites run on Apache and Nginx, the most popular web servers . And yes, even Fortune 500 companies use Nginx.

One of the reasons open source software (OSS) has massive usage is that there are lots of contributors.

Developers from anywhere in the world can bring their ideas, perspectives, and use cases to software, making it more dynamic. This leads to wider adoption.

The crazy thing is, OSS has not always been here. There was a time when you needed to build your own compilers, text editors, and maybe an operating system before you could write a program!

In this article, we take a walk through history and explore the beginnings of open source, its rise, its downsides, and what the future of open source could look like.

What is Open Source? A Definition

As a software engineer, it might seem silly to stop and think about the meaning of "open source."

But have you ever stopped to explain open source to someone who isn't in technology or to the proverbial five-year-old?

At its core, open source is an idea. It’s a concept that revolves around access. You can access someone else’s source code (or even a company’s). This way, you can customize it for your use case, find bugs, and fix them too.

Better still, you can share your “version” of the source code with others in addition to the original.

The person who writes the inceptive source code gives this access, which is an invitation to contribute, based on existing licenses. Different licenses will have certain limitations or obligations.

Open source can also be seen as a movement. Yes, initially, open source was a “rebellion” against closed source (proprietary software whose source code is “owned” by a certain company or organization and therefore is not accessible).

Developers did not want to keep paying for software that did not meet their use cases, had bugs that they could not always fix, and had security issues. They also didn't want to have to wait for the next big update to have even the smallest bug fixes. Let’s not even get started with vendor lock-in.

Richard Stallman, who is hailed as the father of open source, seems to prefer to use “ free software ” instead. He believes that open source and free software have come to stand for very different philosophies over time.

Who Owns Open Source Software?

sofware-developer-thinking-while-touching-beard-while-typing-laptop-sitting-desk-with-multiple-screens-parsing-code-focused-database-admin-working-with-team-coding-background--1-

So, is there any particular person or group of people who own a particular piece of OSS?

Ideally, the authors of the software are its owners. This is, however, a tricky way to look at it because, in some cases, there are thousands of authors.

A better way to look at “ownership” would be in terms of rights, intellectual property, or copyright.

Software Licenses

This is where licenses come into play. There are licenses that do not allow for the sale of the original software or its versions, while others require you to “update” the initial code base with the changes you make.

The terms of “ownership” are therefore defined by the licenses the code is distributed under. Since you are likely to have several libraries and frameworks within your open-source code base, you need to adhere to those other licenses, too.

There can be different "levels of ownership" for open source projects, from contributors to maintainers to committers.

All these levels have different types of access to the code base. The “higher tiers” get to approve changes that will be included in the core code base for official releases.

Committees and organizations like the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) are in charge of bigger open source projects. There is an Apache Project Management Committee (PMC) that helps manage the code bases.

It is important to note that open source is a concept that is applicable to other fields beyond technology.

How Did Open Source Software Come About?

The roots of OSS go deep, wide, and far back into the past, as early as the 1950s.

The 1950s – the A-2 system

In 1953, the A-2 system (an equivalent of today’s compilers) was released together with its source code, and customers were asked to send any improvements to UNIVAC (the Universal Automatic Computer).

UNIVAC was a division under Remington Rand, Inc., an early American business machine manufacturer. Remington Rand had acquired UNIVAC patents as well as its creators, J. Presper Eckert, Jr. , and John Mauchly .

There were a few decades of OSS “silence” after the 1950s. Creating software was an expensive and exceedingly complex process. Giving it away for free was thus out of the question.

The 1980s – GNU

In 1983, however, Richard Stallman started to work on the GNU project, which was made up of rewrites of closed software he frequently used.

GNU stands for "GNU’s Not Unix" and is pronounced as one syllable with a hard g.

In 1984, Stallman spearheaded the creation of the GNU, a free operating system that was made to counter closed systems.

In 1985, he wrote the GNU Manifesto, asking for support in the development of the GNU operating system.

He also founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a nonprofit that was aimed at promoting freedom in computer use.

By 1987, most of the essential components of the GNU operating system were complete. There was an assembler, editor, and various Unix utilities like grep and ls. A C compiler was almost finalized.

In the 1980s, Stallman also created the GNU General Public License (GPL). All the components of the GNU operating system were released under this license.

Today, the GPL allows for the freedom to share and change all program versions, ensuring that they remain accessible to all users.

In the 1990s, Linus Torvalds pushed OSS even further by creating the Linux kernel. He then released it to the public in 1991, along with its source code.

It became the kernel for the GNU operating system.

Other salient events in the 1990s that significantly shaped OSS include:

The publication of the Python interpreter source code (1991)
The launch of the Apache HTTP Server (1995)
The coining of the term “open source” (1998)
The release of the Netscape browser’s source code (1998)
The release of Open Office’s source code, the free software counterpart to Microsoft Office (2000)

The 20th century laid a sturdy foundation for OSS. We’ll explore more recent open source developments a bit later on.

The Origins of the Open Source Movement and Community

In this section, we'll trace the origins of open source as a movement and community. We already came across efforts like Stallman’s Free Software Foundation (FSF).

Other significant open source organizations include the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The OSI was created to counter the “free software” approach that Stallman had propagated.

They felt that “open source” took away the focus on “price” and the confusion that “free” elicited from people who heard about it for the first time.

Eventually, OSI began to focus on licenses and published “OSI-approved licenses.”

As more OSS was released, different foundations and communities began to form around it. Python became fully open source in 1999, and in 2001, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) was founded.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) was established in 1999. The first members were some of the creators of the Apache HTTP server, which was released in 1995.

To date, these non-profits have contributed to the growth of open source by encouraging contributions from developers, supporting community events, ensuring the OSS code base stays up-to-date, and releasing new versions.

Docker, for instance, was launched during PyCon 2013.

How Did Open Source Continue to Develop?

The 2000s and 2010s saw exponential growth in open source. Here is a summary:

Open Source in the 2000s

The Free Software Foundation Europe is created to support free software in Europe (2001)
Version 1.0 of Mozilla Firefox becomes available to the public (2004)
Git, a version control system, was released in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, Linux’s creator.
Google releases the Android mobile OS (2008)
Blockchain is built on lots of open source technologies and developers contribute to its code base (2008)
Node.js comes out (2009)
Google Chrome is based on the Chromium project’s open source code. Chrome was initially released in 2011
A lot of open source tools power IoT, including the Linux Kernel. IoT became a conglomeration of technologies in 2013
Containers and container orchestration (Docker 2013 and Kubernetes 2014)
The cloud (2016)
Firefox Quantum (2017). Firefox’s biggest update in 2017, saw it rise to become the third most used browser.

How Open Source Became So Popular

As we have seen, initial open source efforts were geared towards fighting closed source and the exorbitant “rental pricing” that they had for software.

Developers, therefore, began by building the most commonly used components of software, for example, operating systems (think about GNU).

Over time, more and more developers collaborated on building these software components. Non-profit organizations began to publish software under licenses like the GPL.

In the mid-1990s, companies began to create OSS. For example, MySQL AB, a Swedish company, created and released MySQL in 1995.

The open source subscription model

By the early 2000s, companies that created open source projects offered access to their source code for free but charged subscription fees for enterprise-grade support.

One of the pioneers of the “open source subscription model” was Red Hat. Its offering was the Linux server in 2002, which was known as the “Red Hat Linux Advanced Server." It is currently known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Developers could access Red Hat’s Linux server’s source code for free but had to pay for support.

As more and more companies began to follow the subscription model, developers began to contribute to these products.

Their contributions were eventually added to the initial code base.

The open source subscription model, however, evolved into something akin to the freemium model. Companies would release a free version of their software, and developers and businesses would pay to access more features.

With the introduction of the cloud, the free versions began to be hosted in the cloud, resulting in the Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

These free versions are still available for developers to contribute to. Today, many developers contribute to software whose original code base was written by employees of a particular company. This is true even for Big Tech.

If the contributions are deemed significant, they are assimilated into the core code base.

Developers give feedback and even request features that better suit their use cases. As a result, a lot of open source companies will share a roadmap of their upcoming features and include some of their users’ suggestions in their game plans.

The best thing is that all the contributions and conversations happen on GitHub, Discord, Slack, community forums, and even Hacker News or Reddit. If the companies are proactive, then both their products and the developer community benefit.

Developers will identify bugs and test new features too. As the product’s GitHub stars and forks increase, more users are willing to use it, and more people are willing to contribute.

As developers discover these open source projects, they incorporate them into their own projects and sometimes even work projects.

As a result, organizations and businesses end up using the OSS as part of their final product. Eventually, they could even pay for the enterprise versions.

Some companies still use the freemium model, where developers can use the software for free and access the source code. They only get to pay if they are looking to scale, for example.

Why the Open Source Movement Has Grown So Much Recently

According to the 2023 State of Open Source Report by OSI and OpenLogic by Perforce, 80.04% of the respondents said that their organization had increased its use of OSS in the last 12 months.

The same survey listed the top reasons for OSS adoption among organizations as:

Better access to innovations and the latest technologies
Faster deployments
Access to stable technologies with community long-term support
The ability to contribute to, and influence the direction of open source projects
Vendor lock-in

The community aspect of open source is a vital contributor to the growth and adoption of OSS among organizations. It is the heartbeat of open source as a movement, too.

The open source community has supported the open source movement and software through its generous contributions via feedback, and trying out as well as improving the OSS that is released, since the 1950s.

And the community is here to stay. In 2021, there were 413 million contributions made to the open source projects on GitHub.

OSS, which has the backing of the community, not only has a wide reach but is more stable and up-to-date with patches.

Newer and better versions are also released more frequently. Community-backed OSS also caters to more use cases.

Issues with Open Source

Despite the eminent success of open source, there are a few downsides to it.

First, the licenses that govern open source are quite fragmented. There could be multiple licenses in a single open source project, for example.

You might have used several open source libraries. Depending on the size of the project, it may be virtually impossible to tell how many licenses you need to comply with.

This affects the scalability of OSS, especially in a business context where compliance matters.

Second, with the advent of technologies like the cloud, keeping projects open source is becoming harder and harder. A lot of open source projects are powered by closed cloud products.

There is a need for the cloud to adhere to open source principles if open source is going to thrive in the cloud, too.

Third, as more and more organizations adopt OSS, there’s a lack of people with the technical skill set to help them integrate it into their existing systems.

There are also challenges that stem from support, as shown in the following image.

Fourth, sometimes OSS is poorly documented, difficult to use, and doesn’t always work outside the box. This is because OSS may not always focus on user experience (UX). To get a piece of OSS running, you need to have the technical know-how to install and configure it.

Some OSS also have a very small team of developers actively working on them. This may affect things like UX and even the frequency of updates and upgrades, as well as the speed of innovation.

The Future of Open Source

The future of open source is bright. With technologies like containerization and the cloud, developers will need to work with a set of tools that make their own work easier.

With containers, for example, developers can build once and use the same code base in multiple environments without much setup and configuration.

Internally, developer teams will need to build workflows that can help them deliver faster. DevOps is already doing that with CI/CD pipelines.

The 2023 State of Open Source Report by OSI and OpenLogic by Perforce showed that larger organizations (with over 5,000 employees) intended to use Kubernetes and Kubernetes operators over the next 18 months.

The open source community is therefore likely to continue to support efforts that make life easier through automation and containerization.

This doesn’t mean that older technologies that are still in use will be neglected. By all means, no. The Linux kernel still supports lots of OSS today.

There are challenges that open source will need to overcome, though, to remain the powerhouse that it is.

For example, with most companies developing most of the OSS, there needs to be a way for them to keep making money so as to support open source.

With open source practically leveling the playing field, it can become very difficult for companies to differentiate themselves.

This could mean that fewer and fewer companies would be able to support the innovation that springs from open source.

All in all, open source has managed to survive decades, and we know that despite the obstacles it will have to face, it will conquer.

Wrapping Up

We have journeyed through open source in a bid to understand what it is and trace its origins and development over the years and decades. We've discussed its popularity, and even the challenges that it has had to conquer and is still facing today.

Ultimately, we looked at what the future of open source could look like.

I hope that I answered the questions that you might have had about open source’s origins, and hopefully, you are inspired to contribute to OSS. Because why not?

I create worlds in words, code, and empathy. Words to make complex concepts simpler to understand. Code to build solutions. Life is a big experiment.

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Illustration with collage of pictograms of computer monitor, server, clouds, dots

Open source software is software developed and maintained through open collaboration. It is made available for anyone to use, examine, alter and redistribute however they like, typically at no cost.

Open source contrasts with proprietary or closed-source software applications, such as Microsoft Word or Adobe Illustrator, for example. The creator or copyright holder sells the proprietary or closed source sofware to end users, who are not allowed to edit, enhance or redistribute the product except as specified by the copyright holder.

The term "open source" also refers more generally to a community-based approach to creating any intellectual property, such as software, through open collaboration, inclusiveness, transparency and frequent public updates.

Learn common customer pain points that AI can address, what capabilities are available today, and how IBM Z is the ideal AI platform.

Until the mid-1970s, computer code was seen as implicit to the operation of the computer hardware, and not unique intellectual property subject to copyright protection. Organizations programmed their own software, and code sharing was a common practice.

The Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works was established in 1974 and concluded that software code was a category of creative work suitable for copyright protection. This fueled the growth of independent software publishing as an industry, with proprietary source code as the primary source of revenue. As personal computing brought applications to every corporate desk and many households, the market for software became intensely competitive and software publishers became increasingly alert to infringements of their property rights.

A rebellion of sorts against the restrictions and limitations of proprietary software began in 1983. Programmer Richard Stallman chafed at the notion that users could not customize proprietary software however they saw fit to accomplish their work. Stallman felt that “software should be free—as in speech, not beer,” and championed the notion of software that was freely available for customization.

Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation, and would go on to drive the development of an open source alternative to the AT&T-owned Unix operating system, among other applications. He also innovated the first copyleft software license, the GNU General Public License (GPL), which required anyone who enhanced his source code to likewise publish their edited version freely to all.

Eric S. Raymond’s 1997 essay titled “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” is seen as another watershed in the free software movement. Raymond contrasted the closed, top-down approach typical of proprietary software development where all development was handled by a core group (which he called The Cathedral), versus open, freely shared public development over the internet (The Bazaar). Shortly after, Netscape Corporation released their Mozilla browser code as open source, and the open source movement gained legitimacy.

Because many felt that Stallman’s term “free software” inaptly emphasized “free of cost” as the main value of the software, the term “open source” was adopted in 1999. The Open Source Initiative was created to advocate for it; the organization also has established ground rules for the industry through the open source definition, and hosts compliant open source licenses. Today, the terms free software, open source software, free and open source software, and free or libre-open source software all refer to the same thing: software with source code available for public use and customization.

Open source software now plays a vital role in computing, with open source technologies providing the foundation of the internet, business computing and personal computing. Virtually all computing devices now contain open source code of many types, typically adopted by developers to perform fundamental operations, and often more advanced functions.

Some of the most prevalent open source software applications include:

The Linux® operating system, an open source alternative to the Unix operating system

Mozilla Firefox, a web browser originally based on Netscape Navigator

LibreOffice, a suite of office productivity apps that rival Microsoft Office

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), an open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop

VLC Media Player, a cross-platform app for viewing videos

Open source programs are also widely used in network, enterprise and cloud computing. The categories of open source software cited by IT professionals as the most common within their organizations’ deployments include:

Programming languages and frameworks

Databases and data technologies

Operating systems

Git-based public repositories

Frameworks for artificial intelligence, machine learning or deep learning

The reasons for choosing open source software can vary significantly from person to person and organization to organization. In many cases, end users are completely unaware of the open source programs on their computers or mobile devices. It is also common for end users to download a free application like the Mozilla Firefox browser, or an Android app. These users simply want the software’s functionality, with no intention to rewrite or even look at the source code.

A company, on the other hand, might choose open source software over a proprietary alternative for its low (or no) cost, the flexibility to customize the source code, or the existence of a large community supporting the application. Professional or amateur programmers might volunteer their development and testing skills to an open source project, often to enhance their reputation and connect to others in the field. It is now common for companies to provide paid employees to open source projects to support the vitality of open source software development and help assure high-quality products.

While open source products can spare companies the cost of licensing, they can incur other costs—typically for network integration, end-user and IT support, and other services typically included with proprietary software. Still, many companies consider enterprise open source software to be at least as reliable and secure as proprietary software, and feel more comfortable with open source solutions because they can inspect the program code and understand exactly what they are adding to their computing infrastructure.

The open source development model encompasses the full range. A vast number of open source programs have been originated by solo programmers or small teams of programmers. For example, Guido van Rossum said he started working on the popular Python programming language because he had free time over the Christmas holiday week in 1989. Similarly, the Apache web server began with a small group of programmers working together to enhance server software originally written by Robert McCool as an undergraduate in a supercomputing program.

As these and other open source projects like them have matured, they have involved many thousands of programmers contributing countless lines of code—and testing the software, writing documentation, building the project web site, and more.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Kubernetes container orchestration platform was initiated by Google engineers, as an open source implementation of technology originally created internally to balance Google’s server workloads. Google brought the project to the open source community through the creation of a new consortium within the Linux Foundation called the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Since then, thousands of developers have worked on the evolving kernel, including representatives of major computer companies.

Over time, an ecosystem has to support open source software projects. Code hosting services such as GitHub, Bitbucket, SourceForge, and Google Code provide central repositories, version control, and other functions which enable diverse, distributed workgroups to collaborate on and manage open source projects. GitHub alone has registered 83 million developers and over 20 million open project repositories, with each repository representing a unique branch of an open source project.

A number of non-profit organizations have emerged to support and fund the ongoing maintenance of open source projects, such as the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative. And there are many dozens of application-specific foundations, such as the Linux Foundation, which support specific open source programs and related projects that support those technologies.

“Open source” and “proprietary” represent alternative approaches to ownership of the intellectual property (IP) embodied within an application. With open source, the IP is intended to benefit the public with no profit motive attached to the ownership of the intellectual property. In contrast, proprietary software monetizes the value of the intellectual property by charging a subscription or proprietary license fee.

The idea behind open source software, however, is not primarily an anti-profit or anti-capitalism message, but rather that, in the hands of its user community, the software will naturally achieve its greatest potential by providing greater value to more users. The largest open source project in history—the internet—was originally used to share academic papers; everything beyond that narrow use case is the result of countless minds envisioning and implementing new possibilities.

While open source software is made freely available to the public, it is not in the public domain , a legal category of intellectual property devoid of any ownership rights. Through an ingenious twist of traditional copyright, open source software creators originated what they named “copyleft,” which permits limitless public usage, alteration and redistribution of the source code, but prevents others from making works based on the code into proprietary, copyrighted software. However, today there are more than 100 different types of open source software licenses, some of which do permit derivative works built on open source code to be copyrighted and sold. This expands commercial opportunities for those who create open source software.

Again, Stallman’s GPL stipulated that anyone could rewrite his software however they saw fit, as long as the resulting code was published free for all to use. In this way, the GPL copyleft license created a new kind of quasi-public-domain intellectual property, yet with legally enforceable restrictions imposed by the original copyright holder to protect against later claims of restrictive ownership by others.

Since then, numerous open source software licenses have been developed; the Open Source Initiative lists over 100 approved open source licenses. Some of these allow proprietary products to be created from open source code.

Open source licenses are sometimes categorized as “permissive”—that is, allowing users to copyright their own works—or “protective,” like copyleft. The MIT and BSD open source licenses are the most commonly-used permissive licenses, while GPL remains one of the most commonly used protective copyleft license. Numerous alternative licenses are compatible with GPL or MIT, meaning that that software code written under this license can be used in another application which uses the GPL or MIT license.

While it seems that the creation of open source software is a high-minded, even charitable enterprise, there is work involved in creating, maintaining and evolving it, and getting this work done is a matter of money. Fortunately there are a number of ways that open source projects—and companies built around them—can prosper.

One route is through charitable contributions to foundations. Corporations have an interest in supporting open source software since it provides such significant functionality at such significant cost savings, and will often contribute funds and even dedicate salaried employees to work on open source projects. But this provides primarily for long-term maintenance of the technology, and does not lead to profits for the open source project.

A more common business model is to charge customers for support and expertise. In 1993, Red Hat® began selling its enterprise redistribution of the Linux operating system, charging customers for support and added features aimed specifically at solving problems an enterprise might encounter when deploying a non-curated, continually updated operating system. In 2012, Red Hat became the first open source software company to surpass USD 1 billion in revenue; in 2019 IBM® Corporation acquired Red Hat for USD 34 billion, the largest software acquisition in history.

WordPress, originally a blogging platform, is now widely used for building, managing and hosting websites. WordPress operates as a cloud-based or software-as-a-service platform, and charges customers tiered subscription fees for web hosting, support and added site functionality (for example, e-commerce capability or SEO tools).

Other open software creators charge nothing for their software, but earn significant revenues due to the traffic their software generates. For example, GitHub earns revenues based on advertising that appears on their site; Mozilla Firefox earns revenues from search engines it supports.

IBM and Red Hat solutions can increase productivity, reduce costs and improve business outcomes.

IBM LinuxONE is an enterprise-grade Linux server that brings together IBM’s experience in building enterprise systems with the openness of the Linux operating system.

The Linux operating system on the IBM Z mainframe platform features data privacy and cyber security on a hybrid multi-cloud.

With Enterprise Linux on IBM Power, you can amplify the many benefits of open source technology—reliability, security and scalability—with industry-leading cloud-native deployment options.

From blockchain to containers to AI to operating systems, our developers are creating emerging open source projects and surrounding them with code, docs, and supporting materials.

Improving your software supply chain can significantly minimize your risk of being compromised.

Developers, architects and sysadmins choose open-source-based products like IBM watsonx to represent their needs in key strategic open source communities. Discover the core open source technologies that make IBM's AI platform a high-performing cloud native.

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud offers developers a fast and secure way to containerize and deploy enterprise workloads in Kubernetes clusters. Offload tedious and repetitive tasks involving security management, compliance management, deployment management and ongoing lifecycle management.

Promises and Pitfalls of Technology

Politics and privacy, private-sector influence and big tech, state competition and conflict, author biography, how is technology changing the world, and how should the world change technology.

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Josephine Wolff; How Is Technology Changing the World, and How Should the World Change Technology?. Global Perspectives 1 February 2021; 2 (1): 27353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.27353

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Technologies are becoming increasingly complicated and increasingly interconnected. Cars, airplanes, medical devices, financial transactions, and electricity systems all rely on more computer software than they ever have before, making them seem both harder to understand and, in some cases, harder to control. Government and corporate surveillance of individuals and information processing relies largely on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, and therefore involves less human-to-human contact than ever before and more opportunities for biases to be embedded and codified in our technological systems in ways we may not even be able to identify or recognize. Bioengineering advances are opening up new terrain for challenging philosophical, political, and economic questions regarding human-natural relations. Additionally, the management of these large and small devices and systems is increasingly done through the cloud, so that control over them is both very remote and removed from direct human or social control. The study of how to make technologies like artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things “explainable” has become its own area of research because it is so difficult to understand how they work or what is at fault when something goes wrong (Gunning and Aha 2019) .

This growing complexity makes it more difficult than ever—and more imperative than ever—for scholars to probe how technological advancements are altering life around the world in both positive and negative ways and what social, political, and legal tools are needed to help shape the development and design of technology in beneficial directions. This can seem like an impossible task in light of the rapid pace of technological change and the sense that its continued advancement is inevitable, but many countries around the world are only just beginning to take significant steps toward regulating computer technologies and are still in the process of radically rethinking the rules governing global data flows and exchange of technology across borders.

These are exciting times not just for technological development but also for technology policy—our technologies may be more advanced and complicated than ever but so, too, are our understandings of how they can best be leveraged, protected, and even constrained. The structures of technological systems as determined largely by government and institutional policies and those structures have tremendous implications for social organization and agency, ranging from open source, open systems that are highly distributed and decentralized, to those that are tightly controlled and closed, structured according to stricter and more hierarchical models. And just as our understanding of the governance of technology is developing in new and interesting ways, so, too, is our understanding of the social, cultural, environmental, and political dimensions of emerging technologies. We are realizing both the challenges and the importance of mapping out the full range of ways that technology is changing our society, what we want those changes to look like, and what tools we have to try to influence and guide those shifts.

Technology can be a source of tremendous optimism. It can help overcome some of the greatest challenges our society faces, including climate change, famine, and disease. For those who believe in the power of innovation and the promise of creative destruction to advance economic development and lead to better quality of life, technology is a vital economic driver (Schumpeter 1942) . But it can also be a tool of tremendous fear and oppression, embedding biases in automated decision-making processes and information-processing algorithms, exacerbating economic and social inequalities within and between countries to a staggering degree, or creating new weapons and avenues for attack unlike any we have had to face in the past. Scholars have even contended that the emergence of the term technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked a shift from viewing individual pieces of machinery as a means to achieving political and social progress to the more dangerous, or hazardous, view that larger-scale, more complex technological systems were a semiautonomous form of progress in and of themselves (Marx 2010) . More recently, technologists have sharply criticized what they view as a wave of new Luddites, people intent on slowing the development of technology and turning back the clock on innovation as a means of mitigating the societal impacts of technological change (Marlowe 1970) .

At the heart of fights over new technologies and their resulting global changes are often two conflicting visions of technology: a fundamentally optimistic one that believes humans use it as a tool to achieve greater goals, and a fundamentally pessimistic one that holds that technological systems have reached a point beyond our control. Technology philosophers have argued that neither of these views is wholly accurate and that a purely optimistic or pessimistic view of technology is insufficient to capture the nuances and complexity of our relationship to technology (Oberdiek and Tiles 1995) . Understanding technology and how we can make better decisions about designing, deploying, and refining it requires capturing that nuance and complexity through in-depth analysis of the impacts of different technological advancements and the ways they have played out in all their complicated and controversial messiness across the world.

These impacts are often unpredictable as technologies are adopted in new contexts and come to be used in ways that sometimes diverge significantly from the use cases envisioned by their designers. The internet, designed to help transmit information between computer networks, became a crucial vehicle for commerce, introducing unexpected avenues for crime and financial fraud. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, designed to connect friends and families through sharing photographs and life updates, became focal points of election controversies and political influence. Cryptocurrencies, originally intended as a means of decentralized digital cash, have become a significant environmental hazard as more and more computing resources are devoted to mining these forms of virtual money. One of the crucial challenges in this area is therefore recognizing, documenting, and even anticipating some of these unexpected consequences and providing mechanisms to technologists for how to think through the impacts of their work, as well as possible other paths to different outcomes (Verbeek 2006) . And just as technological innovations can cause unexpected harm, they can also bring about extraordinary benefits—new vaccines and medicines to address global pandemics and save thousands of lives, new sources of energy that can drastically reduce emissions and help combat climate change, new modes of education that can reach people who would otherwise have no access to schooling. Regulating technology therefore requires a careful balance of mitigating risks without overly restricting potentially beneficial innovations.

Nations around the world have taken very different approaches to governing emerging technologies and have adopted a range of different technologies themselves in pursuit of more modern governance structures and processes (Braman 2009) . In Europe, the precautionary principle has guided much more anticipatory regulation aimed at addressing the risks presented by technologies even before they are fully realized. For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation focuses on the responsibilities of data controllers and processors to provide individuals with access to their data and information about how that data is being used not just as a means of addressing existing security and privacy threats, such as data breaches, but also to protect against future developments and uses of that data for artificial intelligence and automated decision-making purposes. In Germany, Technische Überwachungsvereine, or TÜVs, perform regular tests and inspections of technological systems to assess and minimize risks over time, as the tech landscape evolves. In the United States, by contrast, there is much greater reliance on litigation and liability regimes to address safety and security failings after-the-fact. These different approaches reflect not just the different legal and regulatory mechanisms and philosophies of different nations but also the different ways those nations prioritize rapid development of the technology industry versus safety, security, and individual control. Typically, governance innovations move much more slowly than technological innovations, and regulations can lag years, or even decades, behind the technologies they aim to govern.

In addition to this varied set of national regulatory approaches, a variety of international and nongovernmental organizations also contribute to the process of developing standards, rules, and norms for new technologies, including the International Organization for Standardization and the International Telecommunication Union. These multilateral and NGO actors play an especially important role in trying to define appropriate boundaries for the use of new technologies by governments as instruments of control for the state.

At the same time that policymakers are under scrutiny both for their decisions about how to regulate technology as well as their decisions about how and when to adopt technologies like facial recognition themselves, technology firms and designers have also come under increasing criticism. Growing recognition that the design of technologies can have far-reaching social and political implications means that there is more pressure on technologists to take into consideration the consequences of their decisions early on in the design process (Vincenti 1993; Winner 1980) . The question of how technologists should incorporate these social dimensions into their design and development processes is an old one, and debate on these issues dates back to the 1970s, but it remains an urgent and often overlooked part of the puzzle because so many of the supposedly systematic mechanisms for assessing the impacts of new technologies in both the private and public sectors are primarily bureaucratic, symbolic processes rather than carrying any real weight or influence.

Technologists are often ill-equipped or unwilling to respond to the sorts of social problems that their creations have—often unwittingly—exacerbated, and instead point to governments and lawmakers to address those problems (Zuckerberg 2019) . But governments often have few incentives to engage in this area. This is because setting clear standards and rules for an ever-evolving technological landscape can be extremely challenging, because enforcement of those rules can be a significant undertaking requiring considerable expertise, and because the tech sector is a major source of jobs and revenue for many countries that may fear losing those benefits if they constrain companies too much. This indicates not just a need for clearer incentives and better policies for both private- and public-sector entities but also a need for new mechanisms whereby the technology development and design process can be influenced and assessed by people with a wider range of experiences and expertise. If we want technologies to be designed with an eye to their impacts, who is responsible for predicting, measuring, and mitigating those impacts throughout the design process? Involving policymakers in that process in a more meaningful way will also require training them to have the analytic and technical capacity to more fully engage with technologists and understand more fully the implications of their decisions.

At the same time that tech companies seem unwilling or unable to rein in their creations, many also fear they wield too much power, in some cases all but replacing governments and international organizations in their ability to make decisions that affect millions of people worldwide and control access to information, platforms, and audiences (Kilovaty 2020) . Regulators around the world have begun considering whether some of these companies have become so powerful that they violate the tenets of antitrust laws, but it can be difficult for governments to identify exactly what those violations are, especially in the context of an industry where the largest players often provide their customers with free services. And the platforms and services developed by tech companies are often wielded most powerfully and dangerously not directly by their private-sector creators and operators but instead by states themselves for widespread misinformation campaigns that serve political purposes (Nye 2018) .

Since the largest private entities in the tech sector operate in many countries, they are often better poised to implement global changes to the technological ecosystem than individual states or regulatory bodies, creating new challenges to existing governance structures and hierarchies. Just as it can be challenging to provide oversight for government use of technologies, so, too, oversight of the biggest tech companies, which have more resources, reach, and power than many nations, can prove to be a daunting task. The rise of network forms of organization and the growing gig economy have added to these challenges, making it even harder for regulators to fully address the breadth of these companies’ operations (Powell 1990) . The private-public partnerships that have emerged around energy, transportation, medical, and cyber technologies further complicate this picture, blurring the line between the public and private sectors and raising critical questions about the role of each in providing critical infrastructure, health care, and security. How can and should private tech companies operating in these different sectors be governed, and what types of influence do they exert over regulators? How feasible are different policy proposals aimed at technological innovation, and what potential unintended consequences might they have?

Conflict between countries has also spilled over significantly into the private sector in recent years, most notably in the case of tensions between the United States and China over which technologies developed in each country will be permitted by the other and which will be purchased by other customers, outside those two countries. Countries competing to develop the best technology is not a new phenomenon, but the current conflicts have major international ramifications and will influence the infrastructure that is installed and used around the world for years to come. Untangling the different factors that feed into these tussles as well as whom they benefit and whom they leave at a disadvantage is crucial for understanding how governments can most effectively foster technological innovation and invention domestically as well as the global consequences of those efforts. As much of the world is forced to choose between buying technology from the United States or from China, how should we understand the long-term impacts of those choices and the options available to people in countries without robust domestic tech industries? Does the global spread of technologies help fuel further innovation in countries with smaller tech markets, or does it reinforce the dominance of the states that are already most prominent in this sector? How can research universities maintain global collaborations and research communities in light of these national competitions, and what role does government research and development spending play in fostering innovation within its own borders and worldwide? How should intellectual property protections evolve to meet the demands of the technology industry, and how can those protections be enforced globally?

These conflicts between countries sometimes appear to challenge the feasibility of truly global technologies and networks that operate across all countries through standardized protocols and design features. Organizations like the International Organization for Standardization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and many others have tried to harmonize these policies and protocols across different countries for years, but have met with limited success when it comes to resolving the issues of greatest tension and disagreement among nations. For technology to operate in a global environment, there is a need for a much greater degree of coordination among countries and the development of common standards and norms, but governments continue to struggle to agree not just on those norms themselves but even the appropriate venue and processes for developing them. Without greater global cooperation, is it possible to maintain a global network like the internet or to promote the spread of new technologies around the world to address challenges of sustainability? What might help incentivize that cooperation moving forward, and what could new structures and process for governance of global technologies look like? Why has the tech industry’s self-regulation culture persisted? Do the same traditional drivers for public policy, such as politics of harmonization and path dependency in policy-making, still sufficiently explain policy outcomes in this space? As new technologies and their applications spread across the globe in uneven ways, how and when do they create forces of change from unexpected places?

These are some of the questions that we hope to address in the Technology and Global Change section through articles that tackle new dimensions of the global landscape of designing, developing, deploying, and assessing new technologies to address major challenges the world faces. Understanding these processes requires synthesizing knowledge from a range of different fields, including sociology, political science, economics, and history, as well as technical fields such as engineering, climate science, and computer science. A crucial part of understanding how technology has created global change and, in turn, how global changes have influenced the development of new technologies is understanding the technologies themselves in all their richness and complexity—how they work, the limits of what they can do, what they were designed to do, how they are actually used. Just as technologies themselves are becoming more complicated, so are their embeddings and relationships to the larger social, political, and legal contexts in which they exist. Scholars across all disciplines are encouraged to join us in untangling those complexities.

Josephine Wolff is an associate professor of cybersecurity policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her book You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches was published by MIT Press in 2018.

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ESSAY; Whose Intellectual Property Is It, Anyway? The Open Source War

By Peter Wayner

Aug. 24, 2000

THERE'S a war going on. It isn't between ethnic groups, provinces, religions or nations. It is between nimble people who want to think for themselves and big dinosaurs of corporations that want to keep the upstarts penned up and docile.

This is the war of Open Source, and it is being fought in conference rooms, law offices, hacker redoubts and university dormitory rooms and in the hearts of millions of people surfing the Web.

On one side are the big conglomerates that sell gadgets, music, toys, movies, text, cars and tools to the world. They're discovering that intellectual property laws covering trademarks, patents and copyrights can be potent tools to block criticism and keep consumers on a very short leash. All it takes is a SWAT team of well-financed lawyers to stomp out opposition.

On the other side are the folks who think that they actually own what they purchase. They may be car buffs who want to rebore their engine blocks, musicians who want to make copies of tunes to play in their cars or computer owners who want to fix nasty bugs. They all want to get at the guts of the technology because that's where the power is.

In computer terminology, they want to tinker with the source code, the instructions for the computer that are understandable by a programmer. If you have access to the source, you can change the way the machine behaves. Computer programmers routinely adopt the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi from ''Star Wars'' and intone, ''Use the source, Luke.''

In the past, getting at the source of one thing or another was one of the hallmarks of the American can-do spirit. The movie studios routinely celebrated the gritty mechanic or lowly grunt soldier who saved the day with a wrench and an intuitive feel about how machines work. In the past, you were supposed to understand how machines did their jobs.

Today, that kind of curiosity makes you a hacker. The big movie and music conglomerates want to portray the meddling kids who fiddle with DVD players as pirates who are just one click away from breaking into the Pentagon and launching nuclear missiles. To the conglomerates, poking around inside a gadget is just another form of theft.

Lawyers for the Motion Picture Association of America and major movie studios, for instance, have recently been scouring the Net, looking for copies of a program for unlocking DVD movies called DeCSS. They aren't just suing people who use the program to sell bootleg copies -- you don't need DeCSS to do that. They want to stomp out the knowledge of how the program works, and they want to make sure that no one on the Net even links to the software.

The people making the software available contend that they're not pirating movies but are simply arranging to play DVD movies on their Linux machines. They're using the source code in much the same way that Bo and Luke Duke welded a few enhancements to their car in the television show ''The Dukes of Hazzard.''

This desire for control of intellectual property has been inspired in part by the software industry. Most people who buy a piece of software would be stunned to learn that they don't own software that cost $100 -- they've just licensed it.

These licenses often include strict prohibitions on taking the software apart, or reverse-engineering it. If you want to customize the software or find a way to fix the bugs, you're out of luck. If the software runs slightly differently on your computer, you can't do any reverse-engineering to fix it. The companies adopt the rule: ''Thou shall not know the source.''

One of the most infamous license restrictions came attached to Microsoft Agent, a product that helped programmers create little animated helpers on the screen. Buried in the click-wrapped license is a phrase that prohibits anyone working with the product from using ''the Character Animation Data and Image Files to disparage Microsoft, its products or services.'' Luckily, I'm not using Microsoft's tools to write this.

The scariest proposal from the World Intellectual Property Organization, an arm of the United Nations, aims to let big corporations protect facts in their databases. If all goes according to the group's plans, facts will pass out of the public domain when a corporation collects them. Once a company creates a database, it'll be able to stop others from copying the facts in the database without a license. It will own those facts.

While that may protect big databases, it will also constrain little ones. Facts will go from being things owned by everyone to things that can be herded and owned by a single person or company.

The good news is that at least in the software world, the battle against intellectual property constraints is going surprisingly well. In the last 15 years, the open-source software world has produced a collection of operating systems, applications and tools that is often better than most of the commercial systems out there.

The next generation of the Macintosh OS, for instance, is based in large part on open-source operating systems like FreeBSD and NetBSD. Computers based on GNU software (like Unix, but free) Linux or FreeBSD are used to run more than half of the sites on the Web, and they're found in increasing numbers in offices around the world. Even new appliances like the TiVo digital video recorders are based on Linux.

Open-source developers share all of their source code in the hope that others will use it, improve it and perhaps contribute enhancements to the rest of the world. The licenses that control the software make no attempt to stop people from sharing; in fact, they encourage it. There are no thefts of information, and there is no basis for any lawsuits like the one aimed at Napster. The authors want you to enjoy the software and pass it on.

Many people are surprised that the world of open-source code exists at all. How do programmers eat if they don't sell their software? In most cases, they are paid for the work their software performs rather than for the software itself. Many are programmers who use the software for their projects. The Apache Web server, for instance, is produced by a team of people who design Web sites. They charge for the service and share the basic software. In other cases, charging for the software is more trouble than its worth.

Many open-source teams achieved success before the influx of capital and hype. They relied on the freedom to cooperate, and that's often much more valuable. The forces of openness have made surprising strides in the last 10 years. The work of a bunch of hobbyists, teenagers and programmers working in their spare time now often eclipses the work of the biggest companies and their proprietary software. I.B.M. tried for years to dethrone Microsoft with its OS/ 2 operating system. Now the company is backing Linux.

This success scares the dinosaur companies that rely upon intellectual property laws to protect their earnings. If they can't deliver the best solutions to the people themselves, they're reaching to the courts to ensure that no one will supplant them. The lawsuit against the DVD-playing program, for instance, will do more to stop new companies that want to play legitimately purchased DVD movies than pirates.

The lawsuits against Napster may be aimed at piracy, but they could also stomp out small record labels and unsigned artists who want their music to float freely through the world of Napster. But the big labels want to shut down the entire service. If the current laws are not strong enough, they want new laws that will stop people from making some kinds of open technology. They imagine a world where technology will control and limit people instead of liberating them.

Historically, new technologies that appear to undermine old business models have not been as dangerous as they seemed at first. The photocopier was supposed to destroy the book market, but now the bookstores are bigger than before. The VCR was supposed to destroy network television, but now we have more networks than before.

Ever since Gutenberg replaced the monks in the scriptorium, the new technology for copying has made artists and the companies that employ them richer than ever. The notion of opening the source code to the world is just part of that tradition.

Companies have tried to use legal mechanisms to keep their customers under tight rein, but that has never succeeded. If anything, innovation stagnated and the industries declined. Reverse-engineering and the old greasy-knuckled can-do spirit are an important part of guaranteeing competition and protecting the consumer. Imagine if Ralph Nader or Rachel Carson had been hamstrung by the new rules on intellectual property? Many of the car companies now actively encourage the aftermarket, which provides both cool performance enchancers like superchargers and safety devices like infant seats.

The open-source war is not going to be easy for society. The intellectual property laws do help protect creators and their innovations, and corporations instinctively grab as much power as they can get. But if the strength of these laws grows and the teams of lawyers that enforce them become more powerful, society will become much poorer.

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI

Illustration of four hands holding pencils that are connected to a central brain

Students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows.

A year ago, Turnitin rolled out an AI writing detection tool that was trained on its trove of papers written by students as well as other AI-generated texts. Since then, more than 200 million papers have been reviewed by the detector, predominantly written by high school and college students. Turnitin found that 11 percent may contain AI-written language in 20 percent of its content, with 3 percent of the total papers reviewed getting flagged for having 80 percent or more AI writing. (Turnitin is owned by Advance, which also owns Condé Nast, publisher of WIRED.) Turnitin says its detector has a false positive rate of less than 1 percent when analyzing full documents.

ChatGPT’s launch was met with knee-jerk fears that the English class essay would die . The chatbot can synthesize information and distill it near-instantly—but that doesn’t mean it always gets it right. Generative AI has been known to hallucinate , creating its own facts and citing academic references that don’t actually exist. Generative AI chatbots have also been caught spitting out biased text on gender and race . Despite those flaws, students have used chatbots for research, organizing ideas, and as a ghostwriter . Traces of chatbots have even been found in peer-reviewed, published academic writing .

Teachers understandably want to hold students accountable for using generative AI without permission or disclosure. But that requires a reliable way to prove AI was used in a given assignment. Instructors have tried at times to find their own solutions to detecting AI in writing, using messy, untested methods to enforce rules , and distressing students. Further complicating the issue, some teachers are even using generative AI in their grading processes.

Detecting the use of gen AI is tricky. It’s not as easy as flagging plagiarism, because generated text is still original text. Plus, there’s nuance to how students use gen AI; some may ask chatbots to write their papers for them in large chunks or in full, while others may use the tools as an aid or a brainstorm partner.

Students also aren't tempted by only ChatGPT and similar large language models. So-called word spinners are another type of AI software that rewrites text, and may make it less obvious to a teacher that work was plagiarized or generated by AI. Turnitin’s AI detector has also been updated to detect word spinners, says Annie Chechitelli, the company’s chief product officer. It can also flag work that was rewritten by services like spell checker Grammarly, which now has its own generative AI tool . As familiar software increasingly adds generative AI components, what students can and can’t use becomes more muddled.

Detection tools themselves have a risk of bias. English language learners may be more likely to set them off; a 2023 study found a 61.3 percent false positive rate when evaluating Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) exams with seven different AI detectors. The study did not examine Turnitin’s version. The company says it has trained its detector on writing from English language learners as well as native English speakers. A study published in October found that Turnitin was among the most accurate of 16 AI language detectors in a test that had the tool examine undergraduate papers and AI-generated papers.

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Schools that use Turnitin had access to the AI detection software for a free pilot period, which ended at the start of this year. Chechitelli says a majority of the service’s clients have opted to purchase the AI detection. But the risks of false positives and bias against English learners have led some universities to ditch the tools for now. Montclair State University in New Jersey announced in November that it would pause use of Turnitin’s AI detector. Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University did the same last summer.

“This is hard. I understand why people want a tool,” says Emily Isaacs, executive director of the Office of Faculty Excellence at Montclair State. But Isaacs says the university is concerned about potentially biased results from AI detectors, as well as the fact that the tools can’t provide confirmation the way they can with plagiarism. Plus, Montclair State doesn’t want to put a blanket ban on AI, which will have some place in academia. With time and more trust in the tools, the policies could change. “It’s not a forever decision, it’s a now decision,” Isaacs says.

Chechitelli says the Turnitin tool shouldn’t be the only consideration in passing or failing a student. Instead, it’s a chance for teachers to start conversations with students that touch on all of the nuance in using generative AI. “People don’t really know where that line should be,” she says.

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A Guide to the Total Solar Eclipse

By Rivka Galchen

On April 8th, the moon will partly and then entirely block out the sun. The total eclipse will be visible to those in a hundred-and-fifteen-mile-wide sash, called the path of totality, slung from the hip of Sinaloa to the shoulder of Newfoundland. At the path’s midline, the untimely starry sky will last nearly four and a half minutes, and at the edges it will last for a blink. On the ground, the lunacy around total eclipses often has a Lollapalooza feel. Little-known places in the path of totality—Radar Base, Texas; Perryville, Missouri—have been preparing, many of them for years, to accommodate the lawn chairs, soul bands, food trucks, sellers of commemorative pins, and porta-potties. Eclipse viewers seeking solitude may also cause problems: the local government of Mars Hill, Maine, is reminding people that trails on Mt. Katahdin are closed, because it is mud season and therefore dangerous. I have a friend whose feelings and opinions often mirror my own; when I told her a year ago that I had booked an Airbnb in Austin in order to see this eclipse, she looked at me as if I’d announced I was bringing my daughter to a pox party.

Altering plans because of this periodic celestial event has a long tradition, however. On May 28, 585 B.C., according to Herodotus, an eclipse led the Medes and Lydians, after more than five years of war, to become “alike anxious” to come to peace. More than a hundred years before that, the Assyrian royalty of Mesopotamia protected themselves from the ill omen of solar eclipses—and from other celestial signs perceived as threatening—by installing substitute kings and queens for the day. Afterward, the substitutes were usually killed, though in one instance, when the real king died, the stand-in, who had been a gardener, held the throne for decades. More recently, an eclipse on May 29, 1919, enabled measurements that recorded the sun bending the path of light in accordance with, and thus verifying, Einstein’s theory of general relativity .

Any given spot on the Earth witnesses a total solar eclipse about once every three hundred and seventy-five years, on average, but somewhere on the planet witnesses a total solar eclipse about once every eighteen months. In Annie Dillard’s essay “ Total Eclipse ,” she says of a partial solar eclipse that it has the relation to a total one that kissing a man has to marrying him, or that flying in a plane has to falling out of a plane. “Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it,” she writes. During a partial eclipse, you put on the goofy paper eyeglasses and see the outline of the moon reducing its rival, the sun, to a solar cassava, or slimmer. It’s a cool thing to see, and it maybe hints at human vulnerability, the weirdness of light, the scale and reality of the world beyond our planet. But, even when the moon blocks ninety-nine per cent of the sun, it’s still daylight out. When the moon occludes the whole of the sun, everyday expectations collapse: the temperature quickly drops, the colors of shadows become tinny, day flips to darkness, stars precipitously appear, birds stop chirping, bees head back to their hives, hippos come out for their nightly grazing, and humans shout or hide or study or pray or take measurements until, seconds or minutes later, sunlight, and the familiar world, abruptly returns.

It is complete earthly luck that total eclipses follow such a dramatic procession. Our moon, which is about four hundred times less wide than our sun, is also about four hundred times closer to us. For this reason, when the Earth, moon, and sun align with one another, our moon conceals our sun precisely, like a cap over a lens. (I stress “our moon” because other moons around other planets, including planets that orbit other stars, have eclipses that almost certainly don’t line up so nicely.) If our moon were smaller or farther away, or our sun larger or nearer, our sun would never be totally eclipsed. Conversely, if our moon were larger or closer (or our sun smaller or farther away) then our sun would be wholly eclipsed—but we would miss an ecliptic revelation. During totality, a thin circle of brightness rings the moon. Johannes Kepler thought that the circle was the illumination of the atmosphere of the moon, but we now know that the moon has next to no atmosphere and that the bright circle (the corona) is the outermost part of the atmosphere of the sun . A million times less bright than the sun itself, the corona is visible (without a special telescope) only during an eclipse. If we’re judging by images and reports, the corona looks like a fiery halo. I have never seen the sun’s corona. The first total solar eclipse I’ll witness will be this one.

The physicist Frank Close saw a partial eclipse on a bright day in Peterborough, England, in June, 1954, at the age of eight. Close’s science teacher, using cricket and soccer balls to represent the moon and the sun, explained the shadows cast by the moon; Close attributes his life in science to this experience. The teacher also told the class that, forty-five years into the future, there would be a total eclipse visible from England, and Close resolved to see it. That day turned out to be overcast, so the moon-eclipsed sun wasn’t visible—but Close described seeing what felt to him like a vision of the Apocalypse, with a “tsunami of darkness rushing towards me . . . as if a black cloak had been cast over everything” and then the clouds over the sun dispersing briefly when totality was nearly over. Close has since seen six more eclipses and written two books about them, the first a memoir of “chasing” eclipses (“ Eclipse: Journeys to the Dark Side of the Moon ”) and the second a general explainer (“ Eclipses: What Everyone Needs to Know ”).

“I’ve tried to describe each of the eclipses I’ve seen, and I do describe them, but it’s not really describable. There’s no natural phenomenon to compare it to,” he told me recently. Describing an eclipse to someone who hasn’t seen one is like trying to describe the Beatles’ “Good Day Sunshine” to someone who has never heard music, he said. “You can describe notes, frequencies of vibration, but we all know that’s missing the whole thing.” Total eclipses are also close to impossible to film in any meaningful way. The light level plummets, which your eye can process in a way that, say, your mobile phone can’t.

In the half hour or so before totality, as the moon makes its progress across the circle of the sun, colors shift to hues of red and brown. (Dillard, a magus of describing the indescribable, writes that people looked to her as though they were in “a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages”—the faces seemed to be those of people now dead, which made her miss her own century, and the people she knew, and the real light of day.) As more of the sun is covered, its light reaches us less directly. “Much of the light that you will be getting is light that has been scattered by the atmosphere from ten to twenty miles away,” Close said. Thus the color shift.

He showed me the equipment that he has used to watch six eclipses: a piece of cardboard about the size of an LP sleeve, with a square cut out of the middle, covered by dark glass. “I used gaffer tape to affix a piece of welder’s glass,” he said. There are small holes at the edge of the board, so he can see how shadows change as the moon eclipses more, and then less, of the sun. When sunlight comes from a crescent rather than from a circle, shadows become elongated along one axis and narrowed along another. “If you spread out your fingers, and look at the shadow of your hand, your fingers will look crablike, as if they have claws on them,” Close said.

Each eclipse Close has seen has been distinct. On a boat in the South Seas, the moon appeared more greenish black than black, “because of reflected light from the water,” he said. In the Sahara, the millions of square miles of sand acted as a mirror, so it was less dark, and Close could see earthshine making the formations on the moon’s surface visible. At another eclipse, he found himself focussed on the appearance of the light of the sun as it really is: white. “We think of it as yellow, but of course that’s just atmospheric scattering, the same mechanism that makes the sky appear blue,” he said. When he travelled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with his family, in 2017, his seven-year-old grandson said, half a minute before totality, that the asphalt road was “moving.” “It was these subtle bands of darker and lighter, moving along at walking pace. The effect it gave to your eye was that you thought the pavement was rippling,” Close said. He had never seen that before.

The moon doesn’t emit light; it only reflects it, like a mirror. In Oscar Wilde’s play “ Salomé ,” each character sees in the moon something of what he fears, or desires. The etymology of “eclipse” connects to the Greek word for failure, and for leaving, for abandonment. In Chinese, the word for eclipse comes from the term that also means “to eat,” likely a reference to the millennia-old description of solar eclipses happening when a dragon consumes the sun. If the moon is a mirror, then the moon during a solar eclipse is a dark and magic mirror.

A Hindu myth explains eclipses through the story of Svabhanu, who steals a sip of the nectar of the gods. The Sun and the Moon tell Vishnu, one of the most powerful of the gods. Vishnu decapitates Svabhanu, but not before he can swallow the sip of nectar. The nectar has made his head, now called Rahu, immortal. As revenge, Rahu periodically eats the Sun—creating eclipses. But, his throat being cut, he can’t swallow the Sun, so it reëmerges again and again. Rahu is in the wrong, obviously, but in ancient representations of him he is often grinning. To me, he looks mischievous rather than frightening.

The first story I can remember reading that featured an eclipse is Mark Twain’s “ A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court .” The wizard Merlin imprisons an engineer named Hank Morgan, who has accidentally travelled from nineteenth-century America to sixth-century Camelot. Morgan, a man who dresses and acts strangely for the sixth century, finds himself, as one would, sentenced to be burned at the stake. But he gets out of it—by convincing others that he is the cause of an eclipse that he knew would occur. As seems only natural for a beloved American story, it’s the (man from the) future that wins this particular standoff, over the ancient ways of Merlin.

To Close, the beginning of an eclipse feels like “a curtains-up statement from the heavens: Science works. Come back in an hour.” He finds it particularly moving that someone, using only measurements and reason, and the laws of celestial motion, could have predicted the April 8th eclipse down to the minute, maybe to the second. The eclipse that surprised the warring Medes and Lydians into peace may not have been a surprise to all; it is said to have been predicted by Thales of Miletus.

I asked Close if he’d ever met someone on his eclipse journeys who wasn’t much impressed. He said no. Still, it’s possible that I and my mirror friend both have the right intuition about this experience we’ve never had. In the last chapter of Roberto Bolaño’s novella “French Comedy of Horrors,” the young narrator witnesses an eclipse while at a soda fountain with his friends; he also witnesses the people around him witnessing the eclipse, including a couple doing a dance “that was somehow anachronistic but at the same time terrifying.” On his way home, he answers a ringing pay phone and finds himself in a lengthy conversation with a stranger who claims to be a member of the Clandestine Surrealist Group, writers living in Paris’s sewer system. The stranger invites the narrator (who wants desperately to be a poet) to join them, at an appointed time and place, months into the future—but says that they can’t pay for his ticket.

His whole eclipse day is banal (soda fountain, pay phone, the price of things) but also tempting, literally surreal, and like a dream. When our hero finally makes it home, at dawn, he sees Achille, the local drunk. Achille tells him that “the eclipse thing wasn’t such a big deal and that people were always getting excited about nothing. In his opinion, true and incredible things happened in the sky every day.” Nature’s everyday wonders might be the more clandestine ones. ♦

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