Open source is not a branding exercise

Originally published in LinkedIn on 20. november 2025. Source: original article.

Open source is not a branding exercise

It is positive to see Governments, UN organisations and NGOs increasingly adopt the language of open source and open data. This reflects genuine progress and years of sustained advocacy for transparency, interoperability and a shared digital commons.

But we are now entering dangerous territory.

Terms such as Digital Public Goods(DPG) and Digital Public Infrastructure(DPI) are increasingly positioned in the same conceptual space as open source and open data — despite representing fundamentally different models of openness, governance and control.

Open source is not defined by intent, geography, or public benefit narratives. It is defined by clear, enforceable, standardized licensing.

OSI-approved licenses, SPDX identifiers, and license frameworks such as GPL, MIT, Apache 2.0 or Creative Commons create unambiguous conditions for reuse, modification, redistribution and deployment. This legal clarity is what enables global scale, trust and interoperability. Not rhetoric. Not branding.

DPGs and DPIs, by contrast, are not necessarily open by default.

They may be state-controlled, centrally governed or strategically protected. They may restrict forks, limit reuse, require approval-based access or embed proprietary dependencies. Calling this open source because it serves the public is a fundamental error.

DPGs and DPIs may play important roles — but they are governance models, not openness models.

The risk is that these terms are now being blended into a single semantic space where everything sounds open, progressive and inclusive — while legal and technical realities diverge. This creates confusion even among institutions funded to promote openness and undermines the very standards they claim to defend.

Trying to force diplomacy onto open source is like trying to renegotiate the rules of chess before a game. You can discuss strategy, context, or how the board is used — but you cannot decide that the king is no longer a piece on the board, through diplomatically. The rules define the system. In the same way, open source is not subject to political interpretation. You either follow the license, or you do not.

Each new layer of terminology increases complexity, not in a liniar way, but exponentially. At some point, clarity collapses.

This is where the erosion happens. Not by rejecting open source, but by redefining it until it no longer means what it once did.

We should be honest about the risk of an "embrace, extend, and extinguish" dynamic — not necessarily malicious, but driven by diplomacy, institutional alignment and political compromise. When openness becomes negotiable, conditioned or strategically reinterpreted, it ceases to be open. Open source is a legal and technical discipline, not a vague development principle.

If we care about the digital commons, we must defend linguistic precision with the same rigour we apply to code, standards and architecture.