The advent of artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT, has opened some fascinating doors for open source.

To provide key insights and breaking news on this and other open-source innovations, theCUBE analysts reported live from The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit NA event, where they heard from key thought leaders in the cloud-native and open-source communities.

What trends are currently taking place in open source for the developer community, and how are experts collaborating with AI-focused foundations?

“When it comes to AI, they are thinking about it,” said theCUBE guest analyst Rob Strechay. “They’re not sitting on the sidelines — to the point of some of the keynotes being about how they’re embracing other foundations that are bringing more AI to the table.”

Strechay and analyst John Furrier spent three days talking with experts during SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio theCUBE’s coverage of Open Source Summit NA in Vancouver. Among other subjects, they discussed the impact of generative AI, the future of open-source, new tools and demands for more transparency.

Here are three key insights you may have missed:

1. Open source is adapting to AI’s impact.

Many have expressed concerns about the impacts of AI on open source. Still, others believe that AI is a tool that can augment projects rather than replace human coders.

The value of open-source developers in the field of AI appears clear to Google LLC and ChatGPT developer OpenAI LP. But in a recently leaked document, a senior Google engineer warned open-source developers may threaten to overcome the companies. A big subject of conversation at Open Source Summit was the need to adapt to such technologies. It will shake the industry but not topple over the open-source space, according to Furrier.

“I think it adds a lot of value. I think the one smart point that [Cisco’s Ed Warnicke] brought up was the common theme from the experts was that the human has to know the domain that they’re using the AI in. It can’t be a crutch,” Furrier said.

Still, these are early days in terms of AI actually contributing to the work that open-source developers do, according to Strechay.

“People have AI in their product set, but looking at it, using it more broadly, be it going through and looking at all the open-source repositories and making recommendations and things of that nature, make a lot of sense,” he said.

But as Warnicke put it during the conference, it’s sort of like having a junior developer or an intern in one’s organization.

“It’s a really good intern,” Furrier said.

Still, some concerns linger about the future of open source, including around “code pollution,” according to Furrier. That concern, along with those that surround misinformation as data, media and software all become code, will be critical as the industry navigates new terrain moving forward.

Here’s the complete video analysis with John Furrier and Rob Strechay, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Open Source Summit NA:

2. The open-source community is the key.

During Open Source Summit, Amazon Web Services Inc. said it would open-source two new projects, Snapchange and Cedar, the authorization policy language used by the Amazon Verified Permissions and AWS Verified Access managed services.

In the case of Cedar, AWS was open-sourcing primarily for transparency so developers can see that it works as intended, according to David Nalley, director of open-source strategy and marketing at AWS.

“We want customers to have faith Cedar works as intended,” he said. “We want people to go play with it, tear it apart.”

Historically, open source has been a great driver of innovation. But now, with generative AI foundation models creating more and more innovation, open source will only continue to grow. It’s for these reasons, and others, that Snapchange and Cedar have been open-sourced, according to Nalley. The software development kit and policy language are available on GitHub and are written in Python and Rust.

“Specifically, we think that because this gives you that separation from application code, that it allows you a much more rigorous and easily verifiable way to control authorization, to be able to do specific things or access specific things,” Nalley said.

Part of that comes out of AWS’ automated reasoning group. But in addition to that, being able to use logic and formal methods to verify what will happen is very important.

“It’s very powerful in getting assurances about how your code will actually operate in the real world, and especially on some of those fringes,” Nalley said.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with David Nalley:

3. There’s a new need for transparency and responsible regulation.

Open source has carved out a dominant space in the software industry. Some next-gen open-source technologies are breaking barriers. But with a wave of AI coming, so follows a tornado that could cause a massive velocity of “code pollution,” according to Furrier.

But among the biggest concerns is privacy, according to Vincent Danen (pictured), vice president of product security at Red Hat Inc.

“There’s ethics and morality around it as well. If I look at it from a product security side of things, it’s the AI-generated code. Does the AI generate bad code? Does it generate good code? Can you trust it?” he asked.

So how much regulation is required, and how can the industry maintain developer dominance? While some safety regulations are required, it’s all about ensuring it doesn’t cross over into over-regulation. However, some governments have been trying to push a little too hard, according to Danen.

“At the end of the day, that’s going to either cause people to step away from open source — like, I don’t want to contribute to this anymore because now it’s gotten scary — or, they’re just going to be blocking out certain geographies or certain countries,” he said. “We really have to pay attention to the regulation part, because if you make a lot of this stuff too heavy-handed, that’s just going to slow the developers down.”

Still, engaging the next generation of contributors in the open-source community will be key as the community seeks to solve some big problems, such as speeding up the decarbonization of energy systems.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Vincent Danen:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the Open Source Summit event, here’s our complete event video playlist:

Photo: SiliconANGLE