Sep 29, 2025
Chad Spensky
Our Closed-Source Manifesto
I love open source software. I learned how to code and fell in love with computers through open-source software and IRC chat. While at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, I spearheaded the open-source initiative, which now has over 115 repositories – five of which are projects that I led. During my Ph.D., I open-sourced the code for every paper that I published and all of my personal projects can be found on my GitHub. In my personal life, I use a lot of open source software and even built a company based on open-source software, making contributions whenever possible. Simply put, open source software is one of the things that I love most about computer science.
Yet, here I sit as the founder and CEO of Allthenticate refusing to make our source code available. What the fuck, Chad? Hypocrisy! Look, I hear you – I’m not happy about it either. But, please, let me explain before you eviscerate me. Free Open Source Software (FOSS) is a false dream and one of the biggest missteps we have taken as an industry. I’m sorry RMS, but it’s time we look at the facts and revisit what we are truly trying to accomplish with FOSS.
When you give up your source code you give up control. Pick any MAANG-like company. How much of their initial product do you think used FOSS? 80%? 90%? 100%? We all know that Facebook ran on a LAMP stack, and let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that only 50% of Facebook’s total codebase was FOSS when they IPO’d at a $104 billion valuation. Mark Zuckerberg made $19 billion and has significant control over the future of the world’s technology. How much money did all of the open source authors that really made Facebook a success receive? How much control do they have over the future of the Internet? The answers to both are very little, if any. Pick any large company and run this exercise again; a pattern will emerge.
Who controls the future of the Internet? MAANG and friends. Who built the Internet with the best of intentions? Open source software authors and hackers. What do you think the Internet would look like today if the authors of all of this software were in control and not the "entrepreneurs" who used it to build monopolistic empires? Why are Linux Torvalds and folks like him not the wealthiest men on Earth? Every day we see more walled-garden software enterprises, more exploitation of end users, and more enshitification. What’s worse is that we are to blame, for graciously handing over our source code for free to these capitalistic organizations. Please, don’t even get me started on Claude and other AI companies making billions of dollars of our IP that we all so graciously provided as their training data.
The world is not a fair and just place, and the business world is even more depressing. We live in a hyper-competitive, capitalistic society where the winner is almost-never the team that took the moral high road. If we were to open source Allthenticate’s code, it would be stolen and used by potentially much larger and better-funded competitors. Most importantly, these competitors do not open source their software, giving them an even larger advantage. Source available is a losing strategy for startups in general. I hear you in the back screaming, “but, Chad, just pick a license that prevents this kind of theft!” Bullshit. This is a highly competitive arena with billions of dollars on the line. Do you think your competition is afraid of a text file that has no straightforward, well-vetted method for legal enforcement? Spoiler, they don’t. By the time you would even get through the courts with your claim, the damage is already done and the outcome of the legal ruling is likely irrelevant.
Business is war, and giving visibility into your products as a small business without being able to see the competition’s source is the equivalent of fighting a kinetic war where the enemy knows your every move while they maneuver in secrecy. Unless you are a much larger, better equipped company in this scenario, you will lose every time. When it comes to the question of whether or not an early stage company should make their source code available, the answer is clear: they should not and we will not.
On the contrary, large companies that have become critical infrastructure should be required to open-source their software. If you’re so successful that a significant portion of the population depends on your services, the users and regulators deserve to know exactly how it works. At this scale, the companies have plenty of other ways to lock in their customers. For example, they could continue to provide value to their users – wouldn’t that be a nice change. Realistically, they’ll keep doing the exploitative lock-in practices they do today. But, the reality remains that their source code is no longer their competitive advantage and our society has a lot at stake if there are backdoors or suspicious things happening in their code. It would also encourage more competition and drive innovation. There needs to be some way to level the playing field to deter monopolies. Open source may indeed be the solution.
In general, it saddens me that the developers of most of the world’s most useful software are poorly compensated and therefore have no seat at the table for deciding the future. I would love to see some model evolve where the source code can be used freely by individuals and small companies but cannot be freely plundered for ideas or used outright by successful companies. This would ensure that hobbyists can flourish, young companies can still innovate, and, if you build the next Facebook, that all of the developers involved will be compensated, not just the ones that happened to work at your company. I encourage you to check out SourceFirst.com, Louis Rossman’s video, and Eron’s keynote to hear this argument better articulated by someone more qualified than myself.
I understand that source-available products are viewed as more trustworthy and that building trust as a young company is critically important. I can only hope that we can instill enough trust while remaining closed source during our infancy. All I can say is that actions say a lot about a person and a company. Please, dig into my background, look at our board composition, and ask around about the character of the people that work at Allthenticate. I encourage you to poke at our products to see exactly what they are doing behind the scenes, ask us hard questions in our public Slack, and keep us honest to our claims at all times. We are doing everything in our power to create a better tomorrow with a stakeholder first model. My philosophy is that a really great, honest product can still succeed in this world without exploiting the users of the platform.
I’m not in it for the money. I had a modest upbringing in West Virginia and I’ve spent most of my career with my bank account hovering around $0 while pursuing knowledge and trying to make the world a better place. However, money is necessary. Time is not money, but money is time. And, you need a lot of engineering hours to create world-changing products. The more money you have, the more control you have over how others in society allocate their time. This is where the free in FOSS breaks down. There are numerous open-source authors that have generated immense value for society, yet have not been adequately compensated to allow them to allocate more time toward worthwhile projects. I want to fundamentally fix authentication once and for all. I’ve dedicated my life to this pursuit, drained my bank account multiple times along the way, and we are close to achieving the dream of fully decentralized, privacy-preserving authentication. However, if Allthenticate runs out of money, we’re stuck with centralized, enshitified Big Tech solutions. We need to win this war to achieve our mission and our developers that are building this technology deserve to be able to earn a living wage.
Please don’t get me wrong. I still love open source, and we intend to make as much of Allthenticate’s software “source available” as possible. As we rewrite some of our more security-critical code, we are explicitly de-coupling it from our existing codebase to let our users view the source of those components. We have some cool internal tools that we will make available as they mature, and if we hit certain revenue metrics we will provide the source code to some of our more revolutionary technologies. We also actively collaborate with universities to publish our scientific research and findings to continue to the state of knowledge in the field at large.
Y’all, we’ve lost control of our software, our hardware, our privacy, and our digital identities. Honestly, I don’t know what the ultimate solution is with respect to FOSS. But, the most important thing about any game is knowing that you're playing. As someone who bet my career on decentralized authentication, I have to play the “business game” to the best of my ability for the sake of my family, my employees, and our society. I’m sorry that our idealistic open-source dream doesn’t appear to be working and you're welcome for the sacrifices that I have already made and will continue to make for all of us.
I’ll leave with you a few final thoughts:
Do not give away your IP. You worked hard to ascertain the knowledge and develop it. If others profit from it, so should you.
We need more well-intentioned hackers and builders starting companies instead of just giving their code away to greedy “entreprenures”
Young companies should protect their source code until a critical mass of users is hit to remain competitive
Regretfully and Closed-Sourcidly Yours,
Chad Spensky, Ph.D.
a.k.a. Shortman
P.S. I have included a few supplementary articles below if you want to continue reading.
https://www.businessinsider.com/open-source-developers-burnout-low-pay-internet-2022-3
https://www.trevorlasn.com/blog/open-source-is-where-dreams-go-to-die
https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-lead/
https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md
https://liou28335.medium.com/why-i-dislike-open-source-acbc271ba78b
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/burden-open-source-maintainer