Last week, I had the honor of delivering the opening keynote at the China Open Source Conference (COSCon’25) in Beijing, as Kaiyuanshe celebrated its 10th anniversary. Standing before a community that this year is witnessing a “Deepseek moment” driven by open innovation was both humbling and inspiring.

The conference offered rich opportunities for engagement: from a panel discussion about “AI as a Global Digital Public Good” to a meeting with the Kaiyuanshe Advisory Board to discuss opportunities for global collaboration. I also enjoyed meeting with many members of the community in the hallway track and at the amazing fair.

Challenges and Opportunities

My keynote, “Open Source Without Borders: The OSI and Kaiyuanshe Journey and the Road Ahead,” traced the interconnected histories of the Free Software and Open Source movements that emerged in response to a fundamental challenge developers were facing at the time: restrictions and constraints imposed by proprietary software. Those early fights for freedom laid the foundation for today’s global, collaborative ecosystem.

As we stand at the crossroads of emerging challenges, from AI to cybersecurity and digital sovereignty, the role of Open Source and the fight for freedom have never been more critical. Throughout my presentation, I emphasized how the OSI continues to anchor community consensus on what constitutes Open Source, protect the principles and communities that depend on them, and lead global conversations about the future of our ecosystem.

I shared OSI’s work across three pillars: License & Legal (maintaining the OSI Approved Licenses database), Policy & Standards (including the Open Policy Alliance), and Advocacy & Research (like our participation at events like the Open Source Congress and the DPGA’s Annual Members Meeting).

One of the highlights of the keynote was the presentation of the Open Source AI Definition, being developed as a co-design process in which global experts establish a shared set of principles that can recreate the permissionless, pragmatic and simplified collaboration for AI practitioners. An Open Source AI system must grant the freedoms to use, study, modify, and share, supported by access to data information, code, and parameters.

I also highlighted the data governance challenges we face in Open Source AI:

• Openness, fair use, copyright and community compensation
• Bias, diversity and real-world harms
• Transparency, privacy and security tradeoffs
• Interoperability and technical barriers
• AI’s environmental and climate impact
• Cross-border collaboration amid geopolitics
• Policies that ensure auditability and public trust

But challenges present opportunities. The timing felt particularly significant: China’s “Deepseek moment” is a powerful demonstration of how the hacker mindset and the collaborative nature is helping the global AI community to overcome many of the challenges shared above.

I concluded my keynote with a poem inspired by an ancient Chinese wisdom: “穷则变，变则通，通则久”

When circumstances reach a limit,

change brings opportunity;

with change comes solutions;

with solutions comes continuity.

Follow the hacker mindset:

seek new ways and work in the open;

bypass all limits and constraints;

build solutions and fix what’s broken.

The road ahead is full of obstacles,

but every barrier is a doorway.

Open Source is the key;

let the community light the way.

The Road Ahead

I’m deeply grateful to Kaiyuanshe for the invitation to join COSCon’25. A very special thank you to Emily Chen, Nadia Jiang, Richard Lin, the Kaiyuanshe Board, and all the organizers and volunteers who made the event a great success.

Witnessing China’s Deepseek moment firsthand and learning about Kaiyuanshe’s dedication for over a decade building and championing China’s Open Source community with such vision and commitment is truly inspiring.

The OSI is honored to be walking this road alongside communities like Kaiyuanshe, building Open Source without borders. The future of Open Source will not be defined by the obstacles we face, but by the collective strength we bring to overcoming them. Challenges are simply the gateways to new opportunities. And with communities like Kaiyuanshe, we have every reason to believe that the journey ahead will be one of greater openness, deeper collaboration, and shared triumph.