Open source software is routinely analysed as a market phenomenon: a sector, an industry, a competitive arena. That framing is wrong. Upstream open technology collaboration is a global commons that spans all sectors and industries: voluntary participation, shared governance, results available to all under open licences. It produces no products, fixes no prices, and forecloses no markets.
Where open source does intersect with competition, the dynamics run in one direction. Open licensing removes barriers to adoption. Open governance, the less-discussed but more important dimension, prevents capture by any single actor. And when governance fails, the fork is the corrective: faster, cheaper, and more precise than regulatory intervention. The distinction between upstream collaboration and downstream commercial activity is not a technical detail. EU procurement rules, the Cyber Resilience Act, the AI Act, and future MFF funding instruments all depend on getting it right.
