2025 was touted as the “year of agentic ai/ai agents”.

And nothing meaningful happened.

Organizations like Gartner, IDC, Forbes (all do pay-to-play types of report/analysis churning) etc continued putting out proclamations and prognosis that AI agents will be the norm, everywhere in 2025.

And, yet again, just as they’ve always been about predictions, completely wrong.

Why do they constantly miss the point?

They do not understand how open source communities work.

They’ve framed their world views and economic frameworks in purely monetary terms and cannot comprehend or quantify how things can progress when done, as Linus Torvalds said almost 35 years ago, “just a hobby” – http://tinyurl.com/arfweyo.

Linux today powers a huge portion of the global economy and the vast majority of products and services we enjoy today could not have happened in the time it took, if it were not for the availability of Linux and open source software and hardware. Linux is everywhere, including Mars. And Linus continues to be BDFL.

Fast forward 34 years from 1991 to 2025, Peter Steinberger announces that he’s (re)discovered “his spark” and was convinced that AI will change the world even as it will change software craftmanship.

That move, which I am very sure was helped long subtly with help from ayahuasca experience, helped him engineer a software system that showed how an individual can benefit from all of the S/LLM out there to handle from simple mundane stuff to complex tasks, easily.

What he created, as a solo developer, was called “clawd.bot”. Here’s my post on the move from clawd.bot to finally being called openclaw.ai and how I’ve been experimenting with it.

Just as Linux, which, when initially released, had a lot of capabilities and services that needed to be built along with proper security, access control and so on, OpenClaw too has to evolve.

So, it is with delight that I applaud Peter Steinberger’s decision to set up openclaw.ai as an open source foundation.

That is a natural and right move as and open source foundation can and will ensure that growth and nurturing of a much bigger ecosystem is possible.

The open source community will move the project forward.

It will not be on a monetizing corporate agenda and will be defined by what the community requires and desires and open to the world.

In one elegant step, the a future where openclaw could have been enshittified, was thwarted.

What OpenClaw demonstrated is that with simple tooling, tooling that is deterministic and well understood. By using cron jobs, web hooks, permissioned access, accumulated institutional knowledge stored in marked down text files and a series of scripts (bash etc), you can successfully orchestrate the use of probablistic small/large language models to create actions that can acted upon. You can interface with this via email, huginn (an open source IFTTT-like tool) or any communication tool like Signal etc.

My little experiment with OpenClaw runs in a Fedora VM that is able to connect to my Home Assistance instance and also can be asked to give me bus/train schedules based entirely on my request. I’m not adding other tasks/skills and I think I will curate them as needed.

The LLM that it talks to is variously Deepseek and Phi (just to name two), served from an Ollama instance.

All local, all private.

Nothing mission critical and confidential, yet.

The value of an AI agent is clearly demonstrated without the hype and hoopla.

As I’ve posted previously, an enterprise version of OpenClaw has to built. And, since OpenClaw is on a MIT license, you can take the entire code base and rename it to something else. You can also put that new code base out on a GPLv3 license. Yes, I’ve forked the code.

As Red Hat::Linux, I would want to have Open Hook Enterprise to be the Red Hat of OpenClaw.

With all of that said, I’d like to give a hi-five to Peter as he transitions openclaw.ai into an open source software foundation and, he finds a new hook into (faux)OpenAI. It is his choice and prerogative and I am fully supportive. I just hope he won’t be disappointed.

Open source wins always. Always.

Note: Images that are not screenshots are all generated via reve.com.