By Staff Reporters
If you have visited Opensource.com recently, you might have noticed a distinct and unusual quietness settling over the platform. For a website that has long served as a bustling digital town square for the global open source community—publishing daily stories about creating, adopting, and sharing open source solutions—any lull in activity naturally catches the attention of its dedicated readership.
There is a very good reason for this quiet period, however. Behind the scenes, the community is hard at work on something entirely new. While specific, granular details about the upcoming project are not yet ready for public announcement, there is already an abundance of foundational topics to discuss. And what better way to begin a conversation about the future of a digital network than by looking at the entire internet itself, the fundamental structures that hold it together, and the people who give those networks life and purpose?
The Internet, and Top-Level Domains
To understand where the Opensource.com community is heading, it helps to examine where the digital world came from. Most internet users know instinctively that the internet is, at its core, a network. By definition, a network is simply a group of connections bound together to share information and resources. In fact, the very word "internet" is a portmanteau—a linguistic blending of the words "interconnected" and "network."
In its earliest conceptual and operational days, the internet was a much smaller, tightly controlled system that originally consisted of just two primary networks: the military network and the academic network. These early architects were primarily concerned with robust communication and data sharing within secure, specialized environments. However, as technology advanced and computer hardware became more accessible, the internet quickly exploded in popularity far beyond those initial specialized groups.
As the digital landscape expanded into the mainstream, it rapidly became apparent that different designations were urgently needed to categorize and differentiate various entities operating online. Society needed a way to distinguish, for example, a commercial enterprise selling goods and services from a charitable organization dedicated to a social cause, or a university conducting scholarly research from a governmental department providing public services.
To solve this organizational challenge, engineers and internet pioneers developed designations known as top-level domains, universally abbreviated as TLDs. Today, internet users can choose from a vast and diverse marketplace of TLD extensions, ranging from industry-specific tags to geographic indicators. However, for a long time during the formative years of the web, there were only a handful of these top-level domains available to the public.
These original top-level domains remain remarkably popular and culturally embedded in the architecture of the web today. Most internet users understand implicitly that when they navigate to a web address ending in .com, they are visiting a commercial site intended for business. Conversely, when they visit an address terminating in .org, they recognize that they are engaging with a non-profit organization dedicated to a mission rather than a profit margin. These suffixes do more than just route traffic; they tell a story about the intent, governance, and nature of the entity behind the screen.
Open Source Is a Network
Just as the internet relies on interconnected systems to function, open source as a global movement can manifest in many different ways. Open source can be commercial, driving enterprise software and modern cloud infrastructure. It can be non-profit, supporting public-interest software foundations and digital rights groups. It can be academic, powering university laboratories and collaborative scientific research. It can also be cultural, preserving human knowledge, art, and shared digital heritage.
Yet, no matter what form open source takes, or what industry it happens to be disrupting, it is fundamentally always a network. Sometimes that network is literal and technological, consisting of massive clusters of computers, distributed version control systems, continuous integration servers, and global code repositories. But most importantly, and at its very core, it is a network of people.
Human connection is the lifeblood of the open source ecosystem. Whether individuals are gathering physically at an international conference, meeting informally at a local pub to talk code, or collaborating asynchronously in an online chat room, open source is, above all else, a vibrant community of people working together toward common goals.
For the past twelve years, the website Opensource.com has been supported by a commercial entity, providing the infrastructure and backing necessary to sustain its publishing operations. But the people—meaning the readers, contributors, authors, and advocates who make up the heart and soul of the Opensource.com community—are not commercial entities. They are human beings driven by shared values of collaboration, openness, transparency, and peer production.
The community-driven project currently in development aims to realign these fundamental dynamics, ensuring that the platform’s structure authentically reflects the nature of the people who sustain it. In just one month, Opensource.com is going to resolve that bug and usher in this new era. Stay tuned for further updates as the community prepares to share its next evolution with the world.
