How Tech Giants Are Weaponizing Open Source for Market Control
Source: Substack
Major technology companies—Meta, Google, and others in AI and autonomous vehicles—release open source projects to set industry standards, commoditize rival products, and lock in developer ecosystems before competitors establish proprietary advantages. Rather than owning everything vertically, these firms use open source as infrastructure that makes their paid services and closed-source layers more valuable while making it economically irrational for smaller competitors to build alternatives. The dynamic is sharpest in AI, where open source model releases simultaneously democratize capabilities and entrench the companies with the capital and data to build superior closed systems on top of them.