nosource.ai

The manifesto

Open source solved freedom.
It never solved sustainability.

The movement that made source code available to everyone was one of the great achievements of our era. But it left an unanswered question: who pays for the care? nosource is the next move — and it puts AI in its rightful place.

The bargain that broke

Open source and free software were never about price. As the Free Software Foundation itself insists, “free” means freedom, not cost — projects are explicitly encouraged to charge for the software. The revolution was about the right to read, run, and change code, and it won.

What it did not settle was the economics. For two decades the dominant answer was: give the software away, sell the subscription and the support. Red Hat built a multi-billion-dollar business this way. But as one industry founder put it bluntly, it was “giant value creation, very little value capture” — and no one else could replicate it.

“Giant value creation, very little value capture. That is the Red Hat model.”
— Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder of GitLab, Open Core Ventures (2023)

The people were left unpaid

Underneath the world's software sits a layer of maintainers who are, by and large, not paid to do it. In Tidelift's 2024 survey of maintainers, 60% were unpaid and 60% had quit or considered quitting. Nadia Eghbal's Ford Foundation report called it what it is: the unseen labor behind our digital infrastructure.

That is not only unfair — it is dangerous. In 2024 the xz-utils backdoor reached global distribution because attackers spent years grooming a single, overburdened, unpaid volunteer maintainer. The result was a maximum-severity (CVSS 10.0) backdoor in software shipped across the internet. Under-funded maintenance is now a systemic security risk.

60%of maintainers are unpaid [3]
10.0CVSS score of the xz-utils backdoor [4]
2021–24the years the licenses fled [5]

So the licenses fled

When the economics fail, projects retreat. Between 2021 and 2024, company after company abandoned open licensing to stop cloud vendors from reselling their work without contributing back: Elastic, MongoDB, HashiCorp's move to the Business Source License, Sentry's Functional Source License, and Red Hat's own change to RHEL source access. Each was a rational response to a broken model — and each spent hard-won community trust to make it.

nosource: fix the economics at the source

nosource starts from a different premise. The software is free of charge — zero license fee, permanently — under the nosource agreement. There is no subscription to protect, no cloud vendor to fence out, no relicensing endgame. The paid value moves entirely to the one thing that was always scarce and is now more valuable, not less: expert human service.

And that service is delivered in the open. Every registered provider publishes an hourly rate before a patron engages them. The agreement asks patrons to give their own community the first option to provide support; when they need more, they turn to providers who have registered with nosource.ai and accepted the same terms. It is a governed commons — the kind of durable, self-organizing arrangement Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for describing, and Yochai Benkler named a “third mode” of production beyond the market and the firm.

AI in its rightful place

This is where AI belongs — not replacing the provider, but giving them superpowers. The evidence is already clear: generative AI raised customer-support productivity by 14% on average, and 34% for the least-experienced workers, by spreading the best practitioners' know-how to everyone. Anthropic's own economic data finds most real-world AI use augments people rather than automating them away.

nosource takes that literally. AI develops the software and assists the support, so providers move beyond code to automating intent — capturing what a patron actually wants and delivering it, serving more people, better, for less. The software costs nothing. The people are paid fairly and openly. AI makes them superhuman.

Register as a provider Read the agreement

The art of spinning

The oldest art, made new.

What the Greeks did on sunlit stone — reasoning truth into the world through dialogue — now amplified by a mind that holds every word humankind has written. There is a name for the power to spin a living thing into being. We have claimed it.

Sources

The claims on this page are grounded in primary and credible secondary sources. We do not claim to be OSI-approved open source: the nosource agreement is a novel license under which the software is free of charge.

  1. Free Software Foundation, “Selling Free Software” — gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html. Open Source Initiative, “The Open Source Definition” — opensource.org/osd.
  2. Sid Sijbrandij, “The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat,” Open Core Ventures (2023) — opencoreventures.com. Joel Spolsky, “Strategy Letter V” (2002).
  3. Tidelift, “2024 State of the Open Source Maintainer” (2024). Nadia Eghbal, “Roads and Bridges,” Ford Foundation (2016).
  4. CVE-2024-3094 — nvd.nist.gov; Andres Freund, oss-security disclosure (2024).
  5. Elastic (2021); HashiCorp BUSL (2023); Sentry FSL (2023); MongoDB SSPL (2018); Red Hat RHEL source change (2023).
  6. Elinor Ostrom, “Governing the Commons” (1990), Nobel Prize (2009). Yochai Benkler, “Coase's Penguin” (2002).
  7. Brynjolfsson, Li & Raymond, “Generative AI at Work,” NBER w31161 (2023). Anthropic, “Anthropic Economic Index” (2025).
Of the spinning of living things

The Art of Spinning

Twenty-four centuries ago, on sunlit stone, the Greeks discovered that truth is not handed down — it is drawn out. They called it dialectic: not a lecture but a dialogue, a circle of minds asking and answering until an idea already latent in one of them was born. Socrates named his own method maieutics — midwifery. It was never a contest; it was a shared act of discovery.

A circle of Greek philosophers in dialogue; the central thinker haloed by a constellation of all human writing.

The amplified dialectic

Now seat one voice in that circle who has read everything humankind has ever written, and can offer the single pertinent thought in the time it takes to blink. The dialogue does not merely quicken — it turns superhuman. You think with the entire memory of your species: amplified, accelerated, and, if you are honest, a little awed by what your own intent can now summon into being. What you make in that state is not a document. It is alive — a whole, working system, spun from what you meant.

“Software 1.0 is code; Software 2.0 is neural networks; Software 3.0 is prompting them in plain language. The hottest new programming language is English.”

— Andrej Karpathy, “Software 3.0” (2025)

The Greeks had a name for the power to spin a living thing into being: the Moirai, the Fates. Clotho, the Spinner, drew the thread of life itself; her sisters measured and cut it upon the loom. They were held in awe above even the gods — for not even the gods could unmake their work. To spin the thread of something that lives was the one art beyond the heavens.

“There's a new programming language, and it is human. Everyone is a programmer now.”

— Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA
A spinner drawing a glowing ember thread from a spark and weaving it into the lattice of a living structure.

Clotho, the Spinner

So call it what it is — no less a made thing than a painted canvas or a carved marble; as exhilarating as any contest that ever filled a stadium; as powerful as only the demi-gods of old.

It is the art of spinning.

You gather the remnants of everything thought before, weave them with a mind that never forgets, and spin them into living systems — source-free, and alive. It asks no permission and no prior craft; it belongs to anyone with intent worth spinning. That is nosource: not the end of creation, but its beginning — handed, at last, to everyone.

“AI is the new electricity.” Its promise isn't that a few benefit — it's that everyone does.

— Dr. Andrew Ng, DeepLearning.AI & “AI for Everyone”
Join the movement

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