Open source is software that people share for free, for anyone to use and improve. Much of the technology you use every day is built on it.
Tap anything you use every day
13 of 13 still standing
Every one of these was built on the open-source pieces beneath it. Take them away and none of it holds. A thought experiment, not a forecast.
Scroll back up to put it all back
The browser showing you these words is built on it. So is the phone in your pocket and the TV in your living room.
98 of every 100 web pages viewed worldwide are shown by a browser built on an open-source engine: Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, and others.
StatCounter, worldwide browser share, Sept 2026
7 in 10 phones on the web run Android, which is built on Linux. The other 3 are iPhones, built on Apple's own open-source core.
StatCounter, share of mobile web traffic, Sept 2026
WhatsApp, Messenger, and Signal all encrypt your messages with the Signal Protocol, whose code is open source. WhatsApp alone has more than 3 billion users a month.
Signal, 2016; Meta engineering blog, 2023; Meta, 2025
59% of TVs shipped in 2025 ran Android TV or Samsung's Tizen, both built on Linux. Many of the rest, like LG's webOS and Roku, are built on Linux too.
Omdia, global TV shipments, 2025
The same idea, sharing freely so anyone can build on it, also gave us the web, free maps, satellite photos of Earth, the human genome, and more.
Keep scrolling
Before 2008, about 25,000 Landsat images were sold each year. Once they were free, farmers, firefighters, and scientists downloaded more than 160 million. A 2017 government study put the benefit at $3.45 billion a year worldwide.
U.S. Geological Survey, downloads through March 2024
OpenStax, a Rice University project, writes peer-reviewed college textbooks and gives them away. They're used at 72% of U.S. colleges.
Rice University and OpenStax, Oct 2025. Savings are OpenStax estimates.
On April 30, 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain so anyone could use it. By the end of that year there were more than 500 web servers.
CERN
Unicode, a free standard every tech company uses, defines 172,808 characters for the world's languages, including 3,972 emoji.
Unicode 18.0, Sept 2026
Meta says all of its maps use OpenStreetMap. Apple Maps credits it too.
Meta Engineering, 2023; Apple
RISC-V is a chip instruction set anyone can use without paying royalties. NVIDIA shipped about 1 billion RISC-V cores in 2024 alone.
RISC-V International, Annual Report 2025
In 1996, genome centers agreed to post new DNA data publicly within 24 hours. Today the free GenBank library holds more than 60 trillion DNA letters.
National Human Genome Research Institute; NCBI GenBank, Aug 2026
RepRap, started in 2005 at the University of Bath, published its printer designs for free. After a key patent expired in 2009, companies built on them to make affordable desktop printers.
RepRap project; FDM patent history
The blue is the extra $8.8 trillion companies would need to rebuild the open source they use today.
Hoffmann, Nagle & Zhou, Harvard Business School working paper 24-038 (2024), using 2020 data
That's the tiny black square. Keep scrolling.
The blue square is drawn to scale. Its area is about 2,100 times larger.
Each square's area is drawn to scale.
Harvard Business School working paper 24-038 (2024)
98 of every 100 commercial codebases audited in 2025 included open-source code.
Black Duck, Open Source Security and Risk Analysis report, 2026 (947 codebases)
Open source exists because people and companies chose to share their work so that anyone could use it.
GitHub, where much of the world's open source is shared, grew from 31 million developers in 2018 to more than 180 million in 2025. In a single year they made over 1.1 billion contributions to public and open-source projects.
GitHub Octoverse 2018–2025 (developer accounts; contributions Sept 2024 to Aug 2025)
Give it away free to everyone who can use it
We all benefit from superior products because of it
One of the great modern day triumphs of the public good
A closed product can only become what its owner decides. An open one can become things its creators never imagined.
No permission or fee needed. Linux grew from a student's hobby into most of the world's phones.
Outsiders can spot problems. An outside engineer caught a hidden backdoor in 2024.
One system becomes many products. Android now runs phones, TVs, and car screens.
No starting from scratch. Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Opera share one open engine.
In 2010, half of all web browsing ran on closed engines. By 2025 it was under 1%. Even Microsoft rebuilt its Edge browser on open-source Chromium in 2018.
StatCounter, worldwide browser share by year; open-engine line counts Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge and Samsung Internet only
AI models can be open or closed too. When a model is shared openly, anyone can use it, check it, change it, and build on it. More than 3 million are already shared on Hugging Face.
Each bar counts the models on Hugging Face that started from that open model. A closed model can only be used the way its maker allows; it can't be copied and adapted like this.
Hugging Face model metadata, Oct 2026. Some models count in more than one family, so the bars don't add up to a total.
Linux let anyone build a phone, a TV, or a car dashboard without asking permission.
Open models let anyone build AI for their own language, school, clinic, or business.
Chromium meant no company had to build a browser from scratch.
Open models mean no one has to train AI from scratch. Over 227,000 models already build on Alibaba's Qwen alone.
Because the code was open, an engineer spotted a hidden backdoor someone had slipped in and sounded the alarm before it reached most computers.
Open models can be tested by anyone, not only the company that made them.
SQLite keeps your app data on your own phone.
Open models can run on your own laptop, offline and private. More than 200,000 are packaged to do just that.
Free, shared genome data gave all of medicine the same starting point.
AlphaFold2's open code was used by 2 million people in 190 countries, and its creators shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The next Android, the next Wikipedia, or the next AlphaFold could be built on an open-source AI model, but only if open models exist.
Most downloadable AI models are "open-weight": the trained model is shared, but the training data usually isn't, and licenses vary.Your phone's settings have a legal or licenses page naming the open-source projects inside it. It's a long list.
Leave a kind note on a project you rely on, or sponsor someone through GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective.
Use, share, and support AI models and tools that anyone can inspect and build on.