As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously
On the site since 2013 — commentary added June 2026.
This is the open-source ethos, written two and a half centuries before the term existed. We keep it here because it describes how we actually operate: we build on Debian and a thousand other freely given inventions, we publish our research in the open, and when we fix something — a kernel driver, a local-LLM runtime — we send it back upstream, freely and generously.
Franklin refused to patent his most famous inventions. The repayment model he proposed instead — serve the next person — is the Long Game, and it still compounds better than any license.
