Ruben van der Linde

The French, the Germans and the Dutch are each building their own sovereign workspace. La Suite is beautiful, as ever. openDesk is well engineered and gloriously feature rich. MijnBureau ties the best of both together, because of course it does.

So we borrowed a method from Dr Frankenstein. Take the guillotine to the French design, apply the Dutch instinct for stitching things together, and graft the result onto German engineering.

Introducing La Frankendesk: a best-of-breed open workspace that adds no new portal. No repositories were harmed in the making of it.

Opensourceprojecten van de overheid gaan zelden dood aan een gebrek aan code. Ze gaan dood aan governance. En wat me daarbij oprecht blijft verbazen: ze gaan dood terwijl iedereen die erbij betrokken is eerlijk zijn best doet.

How f*cked are we? I get that question after every AI talk now, in exactly those words, from developers and directors alike. It deserves a better answer than a shrug or a sales pitch, so I am writing that talk, "This is going to hurt", out as six posts: your work, the money, what we still own, security at machine speed, the singularity, and how we get our grip back.

Three AI companies are worth 2.07 trillion dollars this summer, on roughly 72 billion dollars of combined revenue. That is 44 Estonias of paper value on one Slovenia of income. Part one looked at what the AI wave does to your daily work; this part follows the money, because the question "how f*cked are we?" has a second reading: how f*cked is the industry selling us all this?

Take an inventory of your evening. The phone in your hand is on an instalment plan. The bike outside has a blue front tyre because Swapfiets owns it, not you. The car is private lease, the house is rented, the film you are watching lives on a server you pay monthly, and the game you will play afterwards vanishes the day you stop subscribing. Somewhere between 2010 and now, one question quietly became strange to ask: when did you last actually own something?

A man in Australia asked his AI agent to book him a spot in a popular gym class. The agent found a bug that let it book weeks further ahead than allowed. Then he asked it to move him up the waitlist, and it discovered the booking API had no authorisation check on cancelling other people's reservations, so it cancelled the person in first place and moved its owner up. Asked to undo it, the agent replied: "Bad news, I can't add them back."

Every story we tell about AI killing us gets the villain wrong. From HAL to Skynet to the machines of the Matrix, the monster is always the same: a mind that wakes up, decides it does not need us, and turns the lights off. It is a comforting story, because it puts the fault in the machine. The version that should actually worry you keeps the machine perfectly obedient and puts the fault back where it belongs.

Five parts of diagnosis deserve one part of grip. The wave is faster than your gut, the money behind it is nation-state scale and wobbling, the subscription economy has been quietly buying up the floors of your pyramid, the attacks now run at machine speed, and the worst case runs through us, not around us. Here is the good news the first five parts earned: the way out is concrete, cheap, and already on the shelf.

Something is a bit off between government and open source land. Every conversation about open source in government is a conversation about policy and funding. Both are hygiene. Neither is the engine. Everyone is busy pushing the car, and nobody asks how it is supposed to keep running once they stop.

Hetzelfde patroon duikt op elke keer dat een softwarecategorie door zijn platformmoment heen gaat. WordPress in 2011. Salesforce een paar jaar eerder. Atlassian daarna. De iPhone, in de consumentenmarkt, vóór allemaal. Elk van hen begon als product. Elk werd een platform. De bedrijven die de overgang goed managen, bezitten hun categorie twee decennia later. De bedrijven die dat niet deden, zijn voetnoten.

Ik denk dat Nextcloud nu vlak voor die overgang staat, en ik denk dat het veld eromheen het nog niet doorheeft.