The influence of open-source technology is becoming more prominent in the development of AI, according to Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin.
Zemlin and Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), highlighted the importance of open-source tools and platforms in the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) during their keynote address at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China 2025.
Zemlin highlighted DeepSeek’s release of a powerful open-source large language model (LLM) in January as a turning point, demonstrating how freely shared innovations can dramatically accelerate technological progress. Since then, high-performing open-source AI models have been emerging at a rapid pace, pushing even companies like OpenAI to reevaluate their approach to openness in AI development.
Citing a Harvard Business School collaborative study, he stated that open-source software holds a demand-side value of roughly $9 trillion. According to Zemlin, this is due to the fact that developers can access top-quality tools at no cost, allowing them to channel their energy into building features that directly benefit their users. He pointed out that about 70% of the code in today’s products and services is made up of open-source tools.
Looking ahead, Zemlin sees agentic AI, which serveS as a bridge connecting LLMs to real-world systems and applications, as the next major area of growth. A growing range of open-source tools are now being developed to support this new frontier. Technologies such as Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) are helping set industry standards for linking AI agents both with each other and with enterprise platforms. Zemlin believes this evolving ecosystem will lead to AI agents that are more reliable, transparent, and secure.
On his end, Aniszczyk announced a new CNCF effort aimed at extending the success of Kubernetes into the AI landscape. The goal is to create standardized methods for deploying AI workloads, including inferencing and managing distributed models, just as Kubernetes did for containerized apps.
On the licensing front, the Linux Foundation has launched the Open Model, Data, and Weights (OpenMDW) license. This new framework addresses the unique challenges of AI licensing, including model weights, datasets, and metadata. It’s designed to give businesses a clearer understanding of what they’re working with when they use open-source AI resources.
The two stressed the importance of building communities around these open-source AI projects. Aniszczyk added that the CNCF now has nearly 287,000 contributors globally, involved in over 200 different projects. China plays a significant role, consistently ranking among the top three contributing nations, with notable projects likeVolcano and Dragonfly seeing global adoption.
Despite geopolitical challenges, Zemlin remains optimistic, pointing out that open-source software is not restricted by export laws, making it a space where collaboration across borders can still thrive.
For firms like D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) whose focus is on quantum computing, the prospects of open-source solutions development may not be so feasible since their very existence depends on their proprietary systems and software.
NOTE TO INVESTORS: The latest news and updates relating to D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) are available in the company’s newsroom at https://ibn.fm/QBTS
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