The Narrows Bridge: From Open Source to AI
In November of 1938, construction began on the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington state. Twenty months later in July of 1940, it opened to traffic. Connecting the Tacoma and the Kitsap Peninsula west of Seattle, it was at the time the third longest suspension bridge in the world. From the first day of construction it was buffeted by high winds, winds that introduced substantial vertical movement into an engineering structure that generally tries to avoid such. Multiple efforts were made to mitigate these forces and keep them in check. It was an inauspicious beginning for an expensive and complex endeavor.
Some sixty years after construction on that bridge began, a fraught and contentious debate in a then obscure corner of the technology industry resulted in both the term open source and the ten point definition that encapsulates it. While it was accorded little importance at the time, with the benefit of hindsight, this discussion amongst passionate but largely unrecognized technology advocates was of monumental historical importance. Over the nearly three decades since its inception, open source has grown from a seemingly utopian academic curiosity to industry default for large capital markets.
For all of its success, however, open source has been besieged in recent years by attackers from multiple fronts. Most notably, a group of vendors and investors seeking to commercialize open source have attempted to blur that definition to the point of meaninglessness and irrelevance – a conflict that continues today. More recently, however, open source has come under intense pressure as both reasonable and not so reasonable actors alike try to understand how the term applies to Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and projects.
