Gaslighting Openness | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

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Gaslighting Openness

written on June 10, 2026

I have been a staunch supporter of Open Source for a long time, including<br>experiments<br>in<br>funding it.<br>I’m a true believer in the idea that Open Source always wins in the long run,<br>but not automatically and not quickly. Right now it is being stressed by AI<br>slop, shifting contributor dynamics, the falling cost of producing code, and<br>large companies learning to close doors behind them.

A lot of that battle today is manipulation of the narrative. Opinion makers on<br>social media and in business circles increasingly frame access as<br>irresponsibility. That is why the EU’s DMA matters, even if many people<br>(including myself) reflexively hate EU regulation. Apple’s fight over delayed<br>AI features in<br>Europe<br>is not about Brussels being annoying: it is about whether users can access their<br>own devices and data. The phone is yours, the data is yours, yet Apple decides<br>who may reach it and takes the agency away from you and then tries to make that<br>sound like it is in your interest (supposedly it’s for your safety and security).

The closer you get to the core of AI, the more this shows up. Anthropic has<br>every financial incentive to restrict what people can do with Mythos and<br>Fable, and they wrap<br>those restrictions in safety and (national) security language. Some<br>restrictions may be defensible, but not all of them are. They trained their<br>models on public works, then block Open Source attempts to learn from and<br>distill these systems.

Disliking the EU, China, or any other large government should not make us forget<br>that true democratized access to technology including AI is in all our interest.<br>Some temporary product pain, including delayed Apple AI features, will be worth<br>paying if it keeps gates open. We should not let companies own the narrative<br>that preventing access is in our interest, particularly not as Europeans where<br>the odds are already stacked against us by our underdeveloped capital markets,<br>brain drain and internal fighting.

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