Open Source? Nobody Does Open Like Me.

People come up to me all the time. Very smart people. Tremendous people. And they say,

“Sir, what do you think about open source?”

First of all, nobody understands open source better than me. Nobody.

I looked at GitHub. Tremendous website. Very clean. Frankly, I think they copied a lot of it from my hotels.

I practically invented the concept of sharing things. Look at my hotels. Look at my name. I put my name everywhere. That’s open branding. Tremendous success.

But these open source people, they’re strange. Very strange.

They say, “Everything should be free.”

Free? Really?

You spent ten years writing code. You stayed up all night drinking those little energy drinks. Typing like crazy. And then you give it away for free?

I know a bad deal when I see one.

In my world we call that losing.

Now, they say it’s about community. They say thousands of developers work together.

And I like that idea. I love teamwork. The best teamwork. Nobody builds teams like me.

But here’s the problem.

You let thousands of people touch the same code and suddenly nobody’s in charge.

Nobody.

You’ve got some guy in Finland rewriting the database layer. Another guy in Germany arguing about brackets. And a third guy explaining that actually the whole thing should be rewritten in Rust.

And they fight about it. For years.

Meanwhile the product still doesn’t have a proper installer.

I’ve seen these GitHub discussions. They’re brutal. Really nasty stuff. Frankly they make Twitter look polite.

And they have these “maintainers.”

Maintainers.

That means you write the code, give it away for free, and then strangers yell at you when it breaks.

Incredible business model.

They don’t even say thank you.

They just open an issue.

They file things like:

“Your project ruined my build pipeline.”

Buddy, you paid zero dollars.

Zero.

You know what we call that in business?

A very entitled customer.

Now some people say open source built the internet.

Linux. Apache. Kubernetes. All these big names.

And I respect that. I really do. Great software.

But let’s be honest.

The biggest companies in the world are taking that free code and making billions.

Billions.

They hire armies of engineers, wrap the open source stuff in a nice interface, put a little login screen on it, and suddenly it’s a “cloud platform.”

And the original guy?

Still answering bug reports at two in the morning.

Sad.

Now if I ran open source, and a lot of people say I should, it would be very different.

First of all, tremendous leadership.

No endless debates about tabs versus spaces.

We decide. Quickly. The best decision. Everybody loves it.

Second, the licenses would be strong.

Very strong.

If a trillion-dollar company uses your code, they pay something. Maybe not a lot, but something.

We call that respect.

Third, the documentation.

Have you ever read open source documentation?

It’s written by programmers for programmers.

Step one: compile the kernel. Step two: edit the config file. Step three: read twelve comments on Stack Overflow from 2007.

Half the people reading it have no idea what a kernel is.

Disaster.

I would fix that.

Clear instructions. Big headings. Beautiful documentation. The best documentation.

Because if people can’t install the software, what are we even doing?

I would build a tremendous open source platform. The best platform.

We’d call it GitTrump.

Very strong commits.

Look, open source has good ideas.

Sharing knowledge. Building tools together. Transparency.

Those are strong concepts.

But without leadership, without business sense, without somebody saying “this is the direction,” it becomes chaos.

And chaos doesn’t ship products.

That’s the difference.

In my companies we ship.

Always.

So I support open source. I really do.

But it needs better deals. Stronger leadership. And frankly, a little more winning.

Because right now?

The only people getting rich are the cloud companies.

And the poor guy who wrote the code is still fixing bugs at two in the morning.

Not good.

Not good at all.

And if the open source people ever want help with that?

They know where to find me.