Real systems, real money, real people, all of it quietly leaning on code we'd been treating like a practice round. Open Source is a license definition, stewarded by the OSI for decades — and their authority works the way all authority in open source works: it exists because everyone keeps choosing to recognize it. They were the conscientious objectors who looked at commercial open source twenty years ago and said, not my war. Proof of lifeThe hard problem underneath all of this: you cannot tell whether a normal open source project is alive or dead until it's far too late. It grew up the hard way, which is the only way anyone actually grows up.