First things first: I’m typing this on a 2023 Macbook Pro, built by Apple. I own it.

You are reading this on my website, which I built. The source code is on Github.

I own the domain, which I registered in Hong Kong back in 2007. At the time, that kept it close to where I was living – Dalian, China – while still outside the Great Firewall. I should move it.

The site runs in Python, owned by the Python Software Foundation, a charitable foundation that oversees development of the language and core parts of its ecosystem. All of my dependencies are open source and mostly maintained by volunteers. (Some are getting a little stale, though.) One is my longest-running open source project, python-frontmatter.

I wrote the CSS by hand, building on normalize.css. There’s no javascript.

From there, it gets more complicated.

I’m typing this post into VS Code, which Microsoft built. Microsoft also owns Github, where I host the code and the published site, via Github Pages.

And while this site has no javascript, almost everything else I build does, and Microsoft also owns a large chunk of that stack, specifically npm, through Github, and TypeScript.

Back to this site: I save links in an SQLite database. SQLite is in the public domain, though there is a very small company being it, which offers professional support. I use Simon Willison’s sqlite-utils and Datasette to manage that database (and have contributed code to both those projects).

I recently switched this site’s build and dependency system from Pipenv to uv. Astral, maker of uv and other tools, recently sold itself to OpenAI. Pipenv had its problems – speed, mostly – but ownership wasn’t one of them. I worry less about the Python Packaging Authority going away than OpenAI losing interest in maintaining Astral’s free tools.

In my day job, I work in Svelte, whose license points to its own contributors as copyright holders. Vercel officially backs the project, though, and hired its lead author, Rich Harris. (Rich did answer questions about Svelte’s future and independence at the time.)

Svelte (and especially SvelteKit) is tied into Vite, which is part of VoidZero. And VoidZero is now part of Cloudflare. I hope that’s a good home.

Django is the other piece of my work stack, and also the first framework I ever learned. Thankfully, it seems safely housed in its own foundation.

Friends of mine have worried lately about giant companies buying projects they depend on, and I can’t blame them, though I’m also not surprised. Open source projects with venture backing were probably always destined for acquisition. There’s no other realistic way to get a return on free software.

Likewise, projects with a single lead developer or tiny core team are probably better housed at a company that can afford to subsize development. Setting up and running a foundation is hard, and it comes with its own overhead. Svelte was a side project while Rich Harris worked at the Guardian and New York Times, but Vercel can pay him to work on it full time. Bun is in a similar position.

I don’t have a better model to hand anyone. Squaring “software should be free” with “developers should get paid” is a hard problem.

But the risk is real, as everyone who used Skype can attest. The nature of software is churn, and the internet doubly so.