I'm an old Borland guy. I started using Borland tools in the early 1990s, from Turbo Pascal through Delphi. I dabbled in Paradox. I even tried to stick with Borland Office. I wandered through the Inprise years, and the Kylix endeavor, and I was actually a Borland employee during the CodeGear/Embarcadero migrations. You could write a book about the rise and fall of Borland. Suffice it to say that things got dodgy when Borland strayed from its focus on developer tools, and they never really recovered.
One of Borland's missteps came with the open-sourcing of InterBase, its RDBMS. In the early 2000s, open-source software emerged from the academic shadows and began to commercialize. With the IPO of Red Hat, everyone was jumping on the Linux and open-source bandwagon. Borland made their move into this arena with InterBase. Two things soon happened. First, the Firebird project was created as a fork of the InterBase source. Second, Borland retreated from the open-source project and reincorporated InterBase as a closed-source product. One might mark this as the beginning of developers losing faith in Borland.
The InterBase saga illustrates a fundamental truth about open source: it must be a genuine, sustained commitment, not a marketing tactic. Borland's half-hearted attempt alienated developers who had started to build on the open-source promise. The Firebird fork thrived, while Borland's own database product withered. This lesson is still relevant today, especially as companies rush to open-source their AI models and tools. The developers who adopt those tools will quickly abandon them if the vendor pulls the plug or changes the license.
It was developers, then
And it always ends up being about the developers, right? I mean, who can forget a sweaty, maniacal Steve Ballmer jumping around onstage screaming 'Developers, developers, developers'? For many years, Microsoft was notoriously anti-open-source, but even they eventually recognized the power of open-sourcing major tools like .NET and Visual Studio Code. But Microsoft didn't do that out of the goodness of their heart — they clearly saw those tools as a means to bringing developers to their Azure cloud platform.
Consider the broader history of developer-focused platforms. When Amazon launched AWS, they were sidestepping the IT procurement process, making it easy for developers to spin up VMs with just a credit card. This self-service model empowered developers to experiment and build, bypassing the slow approval cycles of traditional enterprise IT. Apple shipped the iPhone without an SDK, expecting developers to figure things out. That didn't last long, and they soon course-corrected, launching the App Store and a robust developer ecosystem. In every case, the key was to attract developers by providing free or low-cost tools and platforms.
Open source is great — but always remember that it offers benefits to companies beyond the software development process. Borland fumbled the ball with their open source efforts, but it soon became obvious how to leverage open source for corporate success. Or, as Stephen O'Grady argues in his book 'The New Kingmakers', developers are the ones who decide what technologies succeed. Companies quickly recognized that courting developers with open-source software and other free resources was the way to bring them into the fold. Because developers write all the software that makes a tool, platform, or application successful, it's always a smart move to make developers happy.
It's developers, now
AI hasn't changed this equation. The latest incarnation can be seen from the company Nvidia. We think of Nvidia as a hardware company, cranking out GPUs as fast as they can. But GPUs don't sell unless there is software that runs on them. Coding against a GPU in plain C++ was miserable, so Nvidia developed CUDA, a proprietary layer that made building for their hardware relatively easy. And the more CUDA is used, the more people depend on Nvidia hardware. This is not an accident. As Nader Khalil, Nvidia's Director of Developer Technologies, told me, 'You have to make the best hardware that you can, and you have to make the best software to utilize it. Software is the part of the stack that touches the user.'
Today, of course, developers are all about agentic coding, and Nvidia is eyeball deep in that world. As such, Nvidia provides a set of open-weight models called Nemotron that developers can use, inspect, and fine-tune for their own purposes. And of course Nemotron runs really well on top of CUDA. Nvidia, like Microsoft and Amazon, is doing this because they want to sell their products to more people. Nvidia can't make enough GPUs for Anthropic and OpenAI to keep up with demand, but they also want to sell GPUs to us developers by enabling us to run our own models on our own computers.
The open source movement began with pure hearts and noble ideals. But the reality of open source is that its nobility is easily melded with business needs. Open source software is really the bait — and developers are the real catch. This pattern repeats across the technology landscape. Meta open-sourced PyTorch, which became the dominant deep learning framework, driving developers to its cloud and hardware infrastructure. Google open-sourced TensorFlow and Kubernetes, building ecosystems that serve its cloud business. Even Elon Musk's xAI recently released the Grok-1 model as open-source, likely to attract developers to its platform.
The AI world is no different. Companies that offer open-weight models, open-source frameworks, and free APIs are not being altruistic. They are building a moat of developer mindshare. Once developers build their applications on a particular model or platform, switching costs are high. This is why we see a proliferation of open-source models like Llama, Mistral, and Gemma — each backed by a company that hopes developers will eventually pay for access to larger models or compute.
Looking ahead, the importance of open source in AI will only grow. As agentic coding tools like GitHub Copilot, Codex, and others evolve, they will rely on underlying models that are often open-weight. Developers will demand transparency and the ability to customize these models for their specific use cases. Companies that provide that transparency will earn developer trust. Those that try to lock developers into closed ecosystems will repeat Borland's mistake.
The story of Borland is a cautionary tale, but also a roadmap. For a company to succeed with open source, it must commit fully. That means not just releasing code, but also fostering a community, accepting contributions, and ensuring long-term governance. Nvidia has done this with CUDA and is now doing it with Nemotron. Microsoft learned the lesson and transformed from an open-source enemy to one of the largest contributors on GitHub. The pattern is clear: give developers what they want — powerful, open tools — and they will reward you with their loyalty and their business.
Source: InfoWorld News