Open vs Closed Technology
The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Why the Fight Over Open Source Is Really a Fight Over Power
The software running most of the world's internet was written by strangers who were never paid, never met, and never asked permission.
The Idea
There is a tension buried inside every piece of technology you use: who gets to look inside it, change it, and share what they find? This is the open vs. closed divide, and it shapes far more than software licensing — it shapes who holds power over the digital world. Closed systems are cathedrals. A single architect designs them; access is tightly controlled; the finished structure is presented to the world complete and opaque. Apple's iOS is the clearest modern example — elegant, curated, and entirely on Apple's terms. You can use it, but you cannot see how it works, cannot modify it, and cannot distribute your own version. Open systems are bazaars. Linux, the operating system kernel that powers Android, most web servers, and a significant portion of the world's supercomputers, was built by thousands of contributors arguing, patching, and improving in public. The source code is visible. Anyone can fork it, study it, break it, and improve it. The surprising thing is not that open source exists — it's that it won, quietly and completely, in the infrastructure layer of the internet, while closed systems won at the consumer surface. Your phone's slick interface is closed; the server it talks to almost certainly runs open software beneath. This split matters because openness is not just a technical property. It determines whether regulators can audit algorithms, whether researchers can find security flaws before bad actors do, and whether any single company can hold an entire technology ecosystem hostage.
In the World
In 1991, a Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds posted a message to a Usenet group that began, almost apologetically: 'I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu).' He was twenty-one years old and mildly annoyed that he couldn't afford a proper Unix licence. What followed was one of the most consequential accidents in technology history. Torvalds made his kernel open — anyone could read the code, suggest changes, and build on it. Within a few years, hundreds of programmers across the world were contributing. Within a decade, Linux was running on the servers of Google and Amazon before either company was a household name. Today it runs on roughly 96% of the world's top one million web servers, and on every Android device on the planet. The contrast with what was happening at Microsoft at the same time is stark. Windows was locked down, proprietary, and fiercely protected. For a long time, Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer called Linux 'a cancer.' In 2001, he warned that open source was a threat to the entire software industry. By 2018, Microsoft had acquired GitHub — the platform where most open-source development in the world now happens — for a sum equivalent to a small nation's annual budget. The cathedral had bought the bazaar, or at least bought the land it sat on. Whether that changes the nature of the bazaar is a question that remains genuinely open.
Why It Matters
Most people experience the open/closed divide as a consumer choice — Android feels more customisable, iPhone feels more polished — and stop thinking there. But the stakes are considerably higher than personal preference. When an algorithm is closed, no one outside the company can verify what it actually does. It can discriminate, manipulate, or fail silently, and the only check on that behaviour is the company's own goodwill. When code is open, researchers, journalists, and regulators can audit it. Bugs get found faster. Abuses are harder to hide. At the same time, open is not automatically good. Open-source code can contain vulnerabilities that anyone — including hostile actors — can study. A critical flaw in a widely-used open-source security library called OpenSSL, discovered in 2014 and nicknamed Heartbleed, had been sitting in plain sight in public code for two years before anyone noticed it. The real question the open/closed debate forces is this: who do you trust to hold power over the tools you depend on? A company with shareholders and incentives? A community with no central authority and uneven quality control? Or some hybrid that inherits the weaknesses of both? There is no clean answer — but knowing the question exists changes how you read every story about technology.
A Question to Ponder
If the code running a system that affects your life — a hiring algorithm, a content feed, a medical diagnostic tool — were made fully open tomorrow, would you feel safer, or more exposed?
Get a new one of these every morning.
Start learning with Thinkable