If you get to see this person again (I assume it is Nirav Patel you are talking about), ask him if he knows Andrew Morton, lead developer and maintainer of the Linux kernel. Andrew is also employed by Google. I used to work with Andrew back in the 1990s, we were jogging buddies too. I expect the CTO of the Linux Foundation probably has a working relationship with him. But I digress.
Open source means anyone can write software and others can use it freely. Even better, the actual source code is published in such a way that others can see the actual source code and can even modify it and re-publish it. That happens quite often and is how the community assists itself. This could help Akida uptake as people write software that can utilise Akida’s IP, and then users need to buy a licence, or buy hardware, or pay for IP on which to run their solution.
You probably have seen that software
@uiux has been sharing. That’s on a platform that is used for software developers to share their code openly. And that is what
@uiux is doing. And uiux’s software can help others work with Akida! At least show them some things that are possible and how simple it is.
For the coding I used to do, we were never allowed to use open source or publish our code as open source. Sometimes we had to work on air-gaped computers in secure internal rooms. It was secret squirrels stuff. I only add that as I expect a lot of companies developing systems utilising Akida may be in the same boat. Their code is the opposite of open-source as their livelihood depends on it. But any open source stuff out there will certainly help with prototyping and proof-of-concept work to show to investors and the like.
My view is that open source is for playing with and testing the waters only. If that is what was meant by “vital to the current evolution of computing” then I agree.
Any real-world, life-critical programs most likely will not contain open source code. The operating system may very well be open source itself, but the applications won’t.