Open Source History Repeats: And Then Someone Offered to Buy the Registry
In 2005 I joined Novell's ANZ pre-sales team with a simple pitch to give customers: choose Novell's Enterprise Linux, which meant SUSE wrapped in a bigger company's brand, and you are choosing neutral ground, not a bet on one vendor's fortunes. Novell had bought SUSE outright two years earlier, for $210 million, and part of my job was explaining why that purchase made the platform more trustworthy, not less. Public Trust New Zealand became a customer on my watch. So did Centrelink in Australia, and Telstra, and a computational cluster for NIWA. I believed the pitch. I mostly still do. What I did not know, standing in front of those slides, was that the company signing my paycheque would itself be sold twice in the following nine years, the second sale carrying off a slice of the same patent portfolio that Unix litigation had made radioactive only a few years before.
Twenty years later, watching a chip maker reportedly close in on buying Hugging Face, the platform a large share of the open-source AI world now treats the way my customers once treated SUSE, this feels less like breaking news and more like a rerun with a bigger budget. Nvidia is reported to have agreed, on the night of 26 August 2026, to pay approximately $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, the company that hosts the models, datasets and libraries a wide cross-section of the AI industry pulls from every day. [1] The deal had not produced a signed agreement as of that report, and both companies declined to comment at the time. Nine months earlier, Hugging Face had turned down a far smaller approach from the same company, reportedly $500 million at a $7 billion valuation, specifically because it did not want one investor able to steer its decisions. [2] A subsequent report put the figure climbing toward $14 billion within the week, though that detail traces to a headline this piece could not independently verify and is offered here only as a sign of how quickly the number itself is moving, not as a settled figure.
Coverage since has centred less on the price than on what Nvidia ownership would do to that neutrality. Hugging Face currently hosts models built on Nvidia, AMD, Apple and Google hardware alike, and some commentary has reached for the old "embrace, extend, extinguish" language once used against large acquirers of open platforms. Other coverage takes the calmer view: Nvidia's own interest in the platform depends on it staying broadly adopted, not narrowly owned. [3] The neutrality question is genuinely international, not a dispute confined to one country. A model trained on Google's own chips and a model trained on AMD's silicon currently sit on the same shelf, discoverable the same way, by the same global community of researchers and hobbyists. That is precisely what a hardware-agnostic commons is supposed to look like, and it is also precisely what a single chip maker's balance sheet has the clearest possible commercial reason to want to influence, whether or not it ever actually does. Nobody outside the two companies actually knows yet which reading will hold up, and this piece will not pretend otherwise.
This is not the first time open source's own commercial history has run this exact play. Attachmate Corporation announced on 22 November 2010 that it would acquire Novell, my old employer, for $2.2 billion, a nine per cent premium to the prior closing price. [4] Buried inside the same transaction, Novell separately sold a slice of its patent portfolio, the same portfolio that had underpinned the SCO litigation this series has already told in full, to a consortium called CPTN Holdings for $450 million. CPTN was led by Microsoft. Under Attachmate, Novell and SUSE kept operating as separate units, but the ownership question I had spent two years reassuring customers about was no longer hypothetical. Four years later, on 15 September 2014, Micro Focus announced it would buy the Attachmate Group, and with it Novell and SUSE, for a figure most outlets put at $1.2 billion in shares, though The Register alone has reported $2.3 billion, a gap I have not been able to reconcile and will not pretend to have settled. [5] Same distribution business. Three owners. Eleven years. Microsoft, in other words, was already inside this story in 2010, on the buying side of the very patent portfolio the SCO litigation had made valuable. Eight years later it would be on the buying side again, this time of the platform itself.
Open source's closest brush with this scale, before now, is Microsoft's 2018 purchase of GitHub, by then the world's largest home for open-source code, for $7.5 billion. Satya Nadella promised at the time that Microsoft would work so every developer could "build, innovate and solve the world's most pressing challenges." [6] GitHub's own chief executive, Chris Wanstrath, said the company would "retain its developer-first ethos and operate independently to provide an open platform." [6] The reaction in 2018 was genuinely mixed. Some developers migrated repositories to GitLab in protest; others waited to see what would actually change. The Linux Foundation itself was reported at the time as broadly supportive of the move, a detail worth remembering now that a different foundation-adjacent platform faces a similar test. Eight years on, GitHub has not been shut down, degraded or quietly folded into a walled garden. That outcome argues against assuming the worst by default. It does not argue that the outcome is guaranteed, and Hugging Face's own neutrality pitch, unlike GitHub's hosting pitch, is specifically a promise about which company's hardware gets to win.
Hugging Face would not even be the only AI-industry acquisition of open developer infrastructure this year. In March, OpenAI announced it was buying Astral, the small company behind three widely used open-source Python tools: uv, Ruff and ty. Astral's team joined OpenAI's Codex group, with OpenAI stating it would keep supporting the open-source tools after closing. [7] Astral's founder had built exactly the kind of infrastructure a large share of the Python world now depends on without asking anyone's permission first; a few years of runaway adoption later, an AI lab with far deeper pockets came calling anyway. Two AI labs, in the same year, reaching to buy the open infrastructure their own industry depends on is a pattern, not a coincidence of timing. Episode 30 of this series asked what the Bazaar's own institutional apparatus looks like once a neutral standards registry can be joined for $350,000 a seat, and left that question open on purpose: is a governed registry the movement succeeding, or the movement being priced. This episode is the sharper version of the same question, with the ambiguity removed. Nobody votes on an acquisition.
Strip away the specific names and the sequence repeats itself almost mechanically: a platform grows on open contribution until it reaches a scale that matters commercially, at which point somebody with a large enough balance sheet makes an offer, and the community that built the thing gets to watch rather than vote.
If a customer had asked me in 2006 what happens if Novell itself gets bought by someone you do not trust, I would have talked about roadmaps and support contracts, not about patent portfolios changing hands through a consortium. I did not have a good answer then, and Novell's own history over the following decade suggests there was not a fully good one to give. The difference this time is scale and speed: Novell to Attachmate was $2.2 billion in 2010. The reported Nvidia number is more than five times that, in a single step, fifteen years later, for a platform far younger than SUSE was when it changed hands. Whether that is a genuinely different kind of risk, or the same pattern the industry has simply never stopped repeating, is not a question I can answer from the outside any more than I could answer it from the inside.
There is a sharper version of that same question I did not ask myself often enough at the time. Part of my job was convincing a Crown entity and a computational-cluster customer that choosing a vendor-wrapped distribution was not, in fact, a bet on that vendor. I was, in effect, selling neutral on behalf of a company that was not itself neutral, that had its own shareholders, its own balance sheet, and, as it turned out, its own eventual buyers. Hugging Face's pitch to the AI industry reads close to identical: build here, regardless of whose hardware or cloud you use, trust the platform rather than the parent. I do not think that pitch was dishonest in 2006, and I do not think it is dishonest now. I think it is a pitch that survives right up until the moment somebody with enough money decides to test it. When the Attachmate news broke in 2010, I remember thinking less about the patents and more about every pre-sales deck I had built around the word "independent." Nothing in the SUSE business actually changed for those customers on the day the announcement landed, which is exactly why the neutral pitch had worked in the first place: independence was never really about who signed the ownership papers, it was about whether the software still ran the same way the day after. That is worth remembering before assuming the worst about what Nvidia's ownership would or would not change at Hugging Face. I have no idea whether Public Trust New Zealand's infrastructure still touches SUSE in any form today, and it would not be my place to say if I did. The point stands regardless of what became of that particular deployment: nobody asked the customers either time it changed hands.
The one structural difference worth naming is that Linux itself was never available to be bought this way. The kernel carries the GPL Torvalds chose for it in its earliest years, and its trademark and copyright coordination sit today with the Linux Foundation, a member-funded nonprofit that no single contributing company, however large its cheque, can purchase outright. That is not an accident; it is a specific legal and governance choice, and it is the reason a chip maker can buy the company that hosts AI models built on Linux-based infrastructure without ever being able to buy Linux itself. Hugging Face is a company. The kernel is a licence, held in trust. The two forms of "open" are not the same, and this reported deal is the clearest test yet of why that distinction matters.
That distinction is not academic to the organisations that depend on it most conservatively. The United States Navy has built submarine combat systems on Linux, a choice that only makes sense if the underlying software can never become a single company's asset to sell, restrict or discontinue. A warfighting platform with a multi-decade service life cannot be built on infrastructure one acquisition away from a different owner's roadmap. The same logic runs through ground software, hardened command systems and the wider defence and intelligence stacks this series has already traced back to Linux and BSD-derived foundations. Hugging Face's reported buyer has never suggested restricting anyone's access to anything, and nothing here claims otherwise. The reported deal simply makes visible, by contrast, the specific structural protection that has kept one part of this story from ever needing to be written the same way.
If the open-source project, platform or community you helped build were suddenly worth billions of dollars to exactly one buyer, would you want it sold, and would your answer change depending on whether you were the one being asked, or the one asking?
This is one of seven weekly series in The Hamberger Report. Subscribe on LinkedIn and the next one arrives in your feed.
The views expressed in this article are entirely my own, informed by more than 30 years of professional experience in architecture, security, and technology leadership in New Zealand. I write as director of Te Pono Limited; the views are personal and do not represent the position of any client, any government agency, or the New Zealand government. My commentary on legislation and policy is analytical, drawing on publicly available sources and my professional expertise in architecture, security, and AI governance, and it is politically neutral.
About the Author: Andreas Hamberger is a New Zealand-based enterprise architect and technology strategist. Over 30 years, he has moved from compiling kernels on a 486 to leading cloud, cyber, and AI transformation programmes across government, banking, transport, and aviation. He founded Yoper Linux, served as a technology specialist for Novell during the Linux Wars, and is the author of "Generative AI: Skynet or Heaven" and "Space Mafia." He can be reached at andreas@thehambergerreport.com.
This article was produced with AI assistance under my direction. Research, drafting and images pass through a pipeline I built and govern: automated gates for source verification, forbidden language and political neutrality, and my own review before anything is published. The tools include Claude, Gemini and Openart. The frameworks, arguments and editorial judgements are mine and are the same discipline I apply to the AI systems I audit for clients. AI accelerated the work; the thinking, and the responsibility for it, are mine.
[1] TechCrunch. "Nvidia closes in on Hugging Face acquisition." 26 August 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/26/nvidia-closes-in-on-hugging-face-acquisition/
[2] Financial Times reporting, cited in "Nine Months Ago Hugging Face Said No To Nvidia Over Neutrality" (tradesandgains.substack.com) and in TechCrunch, 26 August 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/26/nvidia-closes-in-on-hugging-face-acquisition/ (No direct Financial Times URL was located or independently fetched; this date and figure rest on secondary reconstruction, disclosed here rather than presented as primary-sourced.)
[3] The New Stack. "Nvidia's $12.9B Hugging Face deal has an open-source problem." 27 August 2026. https://thenewstack.io/nvidia-hugging-face-acquisition-neutrality/
[4] itpro.com. "Novell acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion." 22 November 2010. https://www.itpro.com/628801/novell-acquired-by-attachmate-for-22-billion
[5] Network World, PCWorld, InfoWorld and SD Times (consistent reporting on the $1.2 billion figure); The Register (reporting a conflicting $2.3 billion figure). No URL captured for either in the source research; the figure conflict is disclosed in the body text rather than silently resolved.
[6] Microsoft. "Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion." news.microsoft.com. 4 June 2018. https://news.microsoft.com/source/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/
[7] Simon Willison. "OpenAI acquiring Astral." simonwillison.net. 19 March 2026. https://simonwillison.net/2026/mar/19/openai-acquiring-astral/ (OpenAI's own announcement returned an HTTP 403 on direct fetch; this citation and the JetBrains and trade-press coverage it corroborates are the basis for holding F7 at Confirmed.)