I argued with the father of open source for 2 years. Now the AI fight is the same — only bigger.

David Siegel, founder and chairman of Open Athena, writes in Fortune about the importance of open source in AI. David's view of software as a body of knowledge that would be made stronger through collaboration was shaped through arguing with Richard Stallman in the 1980s, and he likens AI to the libraries of the future, just as important for learning and dissemination of knowledge as libraries have been.

Read David's article in Fortune, or in PDF form reproduced below.

@misc{siegel2026_david_siegel_fortune_open_source_ai,
  author = {Siegel, David},
  title = {I argued with the father of open source for 2 years. Now the AI fight is the same — only bigger.},
  year = {2026},
  month = {jul},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.openathena.ai/blog/david-siegel-fortune-open-source-ai/}},
  note = {Open Athena Blog}
}