Elon Musk’s claim that he was mis­treated by his OpenAI co-founders failed af­ter nine California ju­rors re­turned a unan­i­mous ver­dict that his law­suits had been filed too late.

Musk ac­cused Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, OpenAI, and Microsoft of “stealing a char­ity” by cre­at­ing a for-profit af­fil­i­ate of the fron­tier AI lab. Jurors, how­ever, found that any harms that Musk may have suf­fered came be­fore the dead­line for fil­ing his claims un­der the law.

While the trial delved deeply into the melo­dra­matic his­tory of OpenAI and fea­tured tes­ti­mony from lead­ing fig­ures in Silicon Valley, it ul­ti­mately turned on fairly nar­row ques­tions of the law. The trial fo­cused on whether and when Altman and the other de­fen­dants had made and bro­ken promises to Musk, but his case failed to con­vince ju­rors that he had a valid claim.

In par­tic­u­lar, OpenAI had ad­vanced a statute of lim­i­ta­tions de­fense, which sought to prove that any harms Musk sought to lit­i­gate had taken place be­fore 2021. (The spe­cific date var­ied by the charge: be­fore August 5, 2021, for the first count; August 5, 2022, for the sec­ond count; and November 14, 2021, for the third count.) Ultimately, the jury found that ar­gu­ment per­sua­sive, which made for a short de­lib­er­a­tion pe­riod.

“There was a sub­stan­tial amount of ev­i­dence to sup­port the ju­ry’s find­ing, which is why I was pre­pared to dis­miss on the spot,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said af­ter the ver­dict was de­liv­ered.

The end of the case means that one ma­jor threat to OpenAI — a pos­si­ble re­struc­tur­ing — is now off the table ahead of its re­ported IPO.

“It did not take [the jury] two hours to con­clude … that Mr. Musk’s law­suit is noth­ing more than an af­ter-the-fact con­trivance that bears no re­la­tion­ship to re­al­ity,” OpenAI’s lead at­tor­ney, Bill Savitt, said af­ter the ver­dict. “They kicked it ex­actly where it be­longs — just to the side. This law­suit is a hyp­o­crit­i­cal at­tempt to sab­o­tage a com­peti­tor.”

Microsoft, which Musk sued for aid­ing and abet­ting OpenAI’s al­leged breach of char­i­ta­ble trust, wel­comed the ver­dict. A spokesper­son for the com­pany said it “remained com­mit­ted to our work with OpenAI to ad­vance and scale AI for peo­ple and or­ga­ni­za­tions around the world.”

The ver­dict came in the mid­dle of a hear­ing to de­ter­mine the po­ten­tial dam­ages to Musk if the ver­dict had gone the other way. While that dis­cus­sion is moot for now, the judge ap­peared un­con­vinced by the anal­ogy Musk’s lawyers drew be­tween his char­i­ta­ble con­tri­bu­tions and in­vest­ments in a for-profit startup.

“Your analy­sis seems to be de­void of con­nec­tion to the un­der­ly­ing facts,” she told Dr. C. Paul Wazzan, the ex­pert who came up with Musk’s es­ti­mate of OpenAI and Microsoft’s wrong­ful gains at his ex­pense — some $78.8 bil­lion to $135 bil­lion.

In a tweet af­ter the rul­ing, Musk ap­peared to take the pro­ce­dural grounds of the dis­missal as a moral vic­tory. “There is no ques­tion to any­one fol­low­ing the case in de­tail that Altman & Brockman did in fact en­rich them­selves by steal­ing a char­ity. The only ques­tion is WHEN they did it!” Musk wrote. “I will be fil­ing an ap­peal with the Ninth Circuit, be­cause cre­at­ing a prece­dent to loot char­i­ties is in­cred­i­bly de­struc­tive to char­i­ta­ble giv­ing in America.”

Reached for com­ment by TechCrunch, Musk’s lead coun­sel, Marc Toberoff, said, “One word: Appeal.”

When you pur­chase through links in our ar­ti­cles, we may earn a small com­mis­sion. This does­n’t af­fect our ed­i­to­r­ial in­de­pen­dence.

Tim Fernholz is a jour­nal­ist who writes about tech­nol­ogy, fi­nance and pub­lic pol­icy. He has closely cov­ered the rise of the pri­vate space in­dus­try and is the au­thor of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a se­nior re­porter at Quartz, the global busi­ness news site, for more than a decade, and be­gan his ca­reer as a po­lit­i­cal re­porter in Washington, D.C.

You can con­tact or ver­ify out­reach from Tim by email­ing tim.fern­holz@techcrunch.com or via an en­crypted mes­sage to tim_fern­holz.21 on Signal.

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May 13th, 2026 | 14 minute read

Modern cars are com­put­ers on wheels - they have more sen­sors than you can count and are con­stantly phon­ing home with teleme­try data like your lo­ca­tion, speed, fuel lev­els, sud­den ac­cel­er­a­tions/​de­cel­er­a­tions, video footage, dri­ver at­ten­tion data from eye mon­i­tor­ing sys­tems, and hun­dreds of other data points. Cars have in­ward- and out­ward-fac­ing cam­eras. They have mi­cro­phones. They have al­ways-on modems. It’s all en­abled by de­fault with dif­fi­cult or mean­ing­less opt-outs, and your data is mon­e­tized through bro­kers like LexisNexis or Verisk. This all brings a host of se­cu­rity and pri­vacy is­sues - here are some over the years:

In 2025 Subaru had vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties al­low­ing any­one to re­motely un­lock cus­tomers’ cars, as well as ac­cess the real-time GPS lo­ca­tion and lo­ca­tion his­tory of the car of the car

Car man­u­fac­tur­ers share your dri­ving data with in­sur­ance com­pa­nies, which then in­crease your pre­mi­ums

In 2023 Tesla em­ploy­ees in­ter­nally shared cam­era footage of naked cus­tomers and other sen­si­tive im­ages

In 2015 Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek fa­mously took over a Jeep Cherokee with full con­trol of the ig­ni­tion, brakes, locks, steer­ing, etc.

Mozilla de­tailed how 25 car man­u­fac­tur­ers scored abysmally on pri­vacy and how they col­lect data in­clud­ing “sexual ac­tiv­ity, im­mi­gra­tion sta­tus, race, fa­cial ex­pres­sions, weight and ge­netic in­for­ma­tion.” They sell this data to third par­ties and use it to build pro­files about you cov­er­ing “intelligence, abil­i­ties, char­ac­ter­is­tics, pref­er­ences, and more.”

Tesla had a vul­ner­a­bil­ity in 2017 that al­lowed any­one to re­motely see your car’s lo­ca­tion, man­age other fea­tures, and even sum­mon the car to them­selves

The Car That Watches You Back de­tails how cars are now serv­ing you ads, as well as col­lect­ing vast amounts of data about you. The Hacker News dis­cus­sion about this ar­ti­cle is what prompted this blog post

Now that we’re suf­fi­ciently mo­ti­vated, what can we do about it? In this blog post, rather than re­ly­ing on com­pa­nies’ promises or mean­ing­less opt-outs, we’re go­ing to stop the data at the source by phys­i­cally re­mov­ing the mo­dem (the DCM, or Data Communication Module) as well as the built-in GPS on my 2024 RAV4 Hybrid, so the car will no longer have the ca­pa­bil­ity to send any teleme­try data back home. Let’s dive in:

Will the car still be func­tional?

Yes. Depending on how dif­fer­ent car man­u­fac­tur­ers have wired their cars, how their soft­ware and firmware were writ­ten, etc., vary­ing lev­els of func­tion­al­ity might be af­fected by re­mov­ing the mo­dem and GPS. For this car:

Everything that re­lies on a data con­nec­tion will no longer work. This in­cludes things like over-the-air up­dates as well as Toyota cloud-based ser­vices and SOS func­tion­al­i­tyThis is a safety trade­off - you’re dis­abling au­to­matic crash no­ti­fi­ca­tion and emer­gency call­ing

This is a safety trade­off - you’re dis­abling au­to­matic crash no­ti­fi­ca­tion and emer­gency call­ing

The car’s mi­cro­phone is wired through the DCM, and in the ab­sence of any other changes re­mov­ing the DCM means the in-car mi­cro­phone won’t work, which is in­con­ve­nient if you plan on tak­ing calls in the car. However we’ll in­stall a DCM Bypass Kit (discussed more be­low) to re­store all func­tion­al­ity and have a work­ing mi­cro­phone

CarPlay has a quirk: the phone uses its own GPS but also ac­cepts a lo­ca­tion sig­nal from the car’s GPS unit. After re­mov­ing the DCM, the car would get con­fused about its lo­ca­tion and some­times jump my po­si­tion to the mid­dle of Nevada (I live in San Francisco), mak­ing nav­i­ga­tion an­noy­ing. To work around this we’ll fully dis­con­nect the car’s GPS, so it can’t send a bad lo­ca­tion to the phone­From the ti­tle of the blog post you might have won­dered why bother re­mov­ing the GPS af­ter we’ve re­moved the mo­dem - who cares if the car has built-in lo­ca­tion when it can’t phone home with that data? This is whyThis is a well-doc­u­mented bug with dis­cus­sions on Apple Support threads as well as car-spe­cific fo­rums like rav4­world. This bug af­fects more than just Toyotas, it’s a generic Apple bug even for peo­ple who haven’t re­moved their mo­dem (but anec­do­tally re­mov­ing my mo­dem made the prob­lem worse)

From the ti­tle of the blog post you might have won­dered why bother re­mov­ing the GPS af­ter we’ve re­moved the mo­dem - who cares if the car has built-in lo­ca­tion when it can’t phone home with that data? This is why

This is a well-doc­u­mented bug with dis­cus­sions on Apple Support threads as well as car-spe­cific fo­rums like rav4­world. This bug af­fects more than just Toyotas, it’s a generic Apple bug even for peo­ple who haven’t re­moved their mo­dem (but anec­do­tally re­mov­ing my mo­dem made the prob­lem worse)

Removing the DCM and GPS may void parts of your war­ranty - just some­thing to be aware of. Thanks to the Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act, it can­not void the whole car war­ranty. It can void cov­er­age re­lated to the work you did (cloud ser­vices, telem­at­ics, etc.) but un­re­lated fail­ures like en­gine prob­lems must still be cov­ered

So thank­fully every­thing in the car re­mains 100% func­tional ex­cept the cloud-based ser­vices men­tioned above, which I did­n’t want any­way. There is also one crit­i­cal caveat about Bluetooth:

No more Bluetooth

Important: Even af­ter the mo­dem is re­moved, if you con­nect your phone to the car via Bluetooth then the car will use your phone as an in­ter­net con­nec­tion and send all the same teleme­try data back to Toyota. However, if you use a wired USB con­nec­tion then it does not do that (see the dis­cus­sion here and else­where), so I ex­clu­sively use CarPlay via USB. I wish I had a way to com­pletely dis­able the car’s Bluetooth func­tion­al­ity, but it’s deeply in­te­grated into the head unit.

If you need USB ca­bles for CarPlay I like these USB-A to Lightning and USB-A to USB-C ca­bles from Anker.

Or, if you pre­fer the con­ve­nience of Bluetooth, you can use a Bluetooth -> wired USB adapter like this one. The adapter re­ceives Bluetooth from your phone and pre­sents it­self to the car as a USB de­vice, so the car treats it like a wired con­nec­tion and won’t tether through your phone.

Now, onto the nec­es­sary tools and parts:

Tools/parts needed

For this pro­ject you’ll need:

A trim re­moval kit (I used this one)

A ratchet, ex­ten­sion, 10mm socket, and 8mm sock­etI’ve been ex­tremely happy with this set. However if you’re not plan­ning on do­ing more handyper­son type work then just bor­row these 4 parts from a neigh­bor in­stead of spend­ing the money on a whole set

I’ve been ex­tremely happy with this set. However if you’re not plan­ning on do­ing more handyper­son type work then just bor­row these 4 parts from a neigh­bor in­stead of spend­ing the money on a whole set

(Optional) A pre­ci­sion flat­head screw­driver (like this one). This can help with dis­con­nect­ing wire plugs

This Telematics DCM Bypass Kit, for fix­ing the in-car mi­cro­phone$90 is a bit steep for a part that prob­a­bly costs less than $1 to pro­duce, but the mak­ers of the kit did the work of read­ing the (paywalled) Toyota di­ag­nos­tics to pro­duce a work­ing prod­uct. If you’d like to build your own ver­sion you’ll need to sub­scribe to Toyota TIS to ac­cess the car wiring schemat­ics. It’s un­for­tu­nate that these schemat­ics and other re­pair man­u­als aren’t pub­lic

$90 is a bit steep for a part that prob­a­bly costs less than $1 to pro­duce, but the mak­ers of the kit did the work of read­ing the (paywalled) Toyota di­ag­nos­tics to pro­duce a work­ing prod­uct. If you’d like to build your own ver­sion you’ll need to sub­scribe to Toyota TIS to ac­cess the car wiring schemat­ics. It’s un­for­tu­nate that these schemat­ics and other re­pair man­u­als aren’t pub­lic

Overall this was a medium-dif­fi­culty pro­ject that took me a few hours to com­plete. Now, let’s get to work:

Removing the car mo­dem

1) Push down on the leather of your shifter and re­move the pin (don’t lose it!):

2) Remove the shifter top:

3) Use the trim tool to pop out the base of the shifter. Just lean it to the side, no need to dis­con­nect any­thing:

4) Use your hands to pop out the next panel and lean it to the side:

5) Remove these three 10mm bolts:

6) Pull on this light gray trim piece un­til it dis­con­nects slightly:

7) Pull the ra­dio out, dis­con­nect the plug, and put the ra­dio aside. The ra­dio is held on by clips only and can even be pulled out with your hands, but it re­quires a lit­tle force and the trim re­moval tool may be help­ful. When dis­con­nect­ing the plug it may help to use the pre­ci­sion screw­driver to push down on the tab to un­lock it, but you can also do it with your hands:

8) Pull the next panel (the seat warm­ing con­trols) out with your hands. It’s only held on by clips but may re­quire a bit of force to re­move:

9) Take a photo of all the wiring con­nec­tions on the seat warm­ing con­trols so you can as­sem­ble it cor­rectly later, un­plug all the wires, and set the con­trols aside:

10) You now have ac­cess to the DCM:

11) Removing the DCM re­quires a lot of ma­neu­ver­ing, tight spaces, and pa­tience, but you can do it. There are two 8mm bolts on the right and one 8mm bolt on the left that need to be re­moved. Getting ac­cess to them may re­quire re­mov­ing some of the other har­nesses or com­po­nents that are in the way - just go slow and steady, take your time, and take pho­tos of things be­fore you move them. After those 3 bolts are re­moved you have a lit­tle more play to pull the unit out, and af­ter dis­con­nect­ing the wires in the back you can com­pletely re­move the DCM. Here’s mine out of the car, part num­ber 86741 – 06130:

12) Now that the mo­dem is re­moved we need to in­stall the DCM Bypass Kit so the in-car mi­cro­phone con­tin­ues to work. It’s ex­tremely straight­for­ward, just plug it into the wiring har­ness that you re­moved from the DCM. The plugs will only fit on the cor­rect wires, there’s no way to get it wrong:

13) Reassemble every­thing by go­ing in re­verse or­der. Make sure all clips, bolts, etc. are back in their orig­i­nal po­si­tion and every­thing is seated cor­rectly. This part should go much faster than dis­as­sem­bly.

Now you’re done with the hard part. Next we dis­con­nect the GPS from the head unit, which is sig­nif­i­cantly eas­ier:

Removing the GPS an­tenna

1) Use the trim tool to re­move the back panel be­hind the in­fo­tain­ment screen:

2) Unscrew these four 10mm bolts:

3) Pop the head unit out (it’s only held on by 2 clips at this point). The part num­ber will vary but for my car it was 86140 – 0R710.

4) The GPS an­tenna is one of the sin­gle-wire ca­bles (not the multi-wire plugs). I had 3 sin­gle-wire ca­bles in my unit and the GPS wire was the black wire shown in the pic­ture. I was able to de­ter­mine this by process of elim­i­na­tion - un­plug­ging one of the wires dis­con­nected my car’s re­verse cam­era, un­plug­ging an­other one dis­con­nected CarPlay com­pletely, and the last one was the GPS - worked like a charm. Again, with a Toyota TIS sub­scrip­tion you can get ac­cess to the head unit wiring di­a­gram and not have to make guesses about which wire is which, but process of elim­i­na­tion worked fine for me:

5) Reassemble every­thing by go­ing in re­verse or­der. Again, make sure that all the clips seat prop­erly.

Confirming it worked

After you have every­thing re­assem­bled, turn the car on.

1) If you un­plugged the mo­dem suc­cess­fully then:

The in­fo­tain­ment screen will have an icon in the up­per right cor­ner in­di­cat­ing no con­nec­tion

The SOS light in the over­head con­sole will be off:

2) If the DCM Bypass Kit was in­stalled suc­cess­fully then:

Make a phone call through CarPlay. The re­cip­i­ent should be able to hear you / the mi­cro­phone should be work­ing

Congratulations - your car no longer has the ca­pa­bil­ity to trans­mit teleme­try data. Of course it may still be cap­tured to lo­cal stor­age and can be phys­i­cally col­lected later, but for me that was fine.

Conclusion

Overall I’m very happy with this pro­ject. Unfortunately I think it’s only a mat­ter of time be­fore the mo­dem and GPS be­come more deeply in­te­grated into the car (making this blog post in­fea­si­ble), or cars have more dras­tic fail­ure modes when the mo­dem/​GPS is re­moved, or anti-right-to-re­pair laws get passed to fur­ther clamp down on this be­hav­ior. For now the win stands - no teleme­try leaves the car. Strong Federal pri­vacy laws would make posts like this un­nec­es­sary, that’s the world I’d rather live in.

Published May 10, 2026, 12:30 PM EDT

His love of PCs and their com­po­nents was born out of try­ing to squeeze every ounce of per­for­mance out of the fam­ily com­puter. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into build­ing PCs for friends and fam­ily, fos­ter­ing a pas­sion that would ul­ti­mately take shape as a ca­reer path.

Besides be­ing the first call for tech sup­port for those close to him, Ty is a com­puter sci­ence stu­dent, with his fo­cus be­ing cloud com­put­ing and net­work­ing. He also com­peted in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, mak­ing him in­ti­mately fa­mil­iar with every­thing to do with pe­riph­er­als.

Sign in to your XDA ac­count

In March 2026, Linux crossed five per­cent of Steam’s user base for the first time, an all-time high for an op­er­at­ing sys­tem that spent two decades as a nov­elty when it came to any kind of gam­ing. Microsoft’s end-of-sup­port dead­line for Windows 10 last October pushed many users to look at al­ter­na­tives, and the Steam Deck has qui­etly turned mil­lions of peo­ple into Linux gamers with­out them re­ally think­ing about it, lead­ing to more wide­spread adop­tion on desk­top ma­chines.

Most of that progress used to hap­pen in­side a piece of soft­ware called Wine, the trans­la­tion layer that con­vinces Windows games they’re run­ning on Windows. Valve’s tuned ver­sion of Wine, called Proton, is what makes Steam Play and the Steam Deck work. For years, every mean­ing­ful im­prove­ment to Linux gam­ing came from changes to Wine and Proton them­selves. That’s still true, but in­creas­ingly the most im­por­tant changes are hap­pen­ing one layer deeper, in­side the Linux ker­nel. The lat­est ex­am­ple of that is some­thing called NTSYNC, a ker­nel-level dri­ver that has of­fered great per­for­mance gains over pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Wine, and is loaded by de­fault on every Steam Deck that’s up-to-date.

Related

What NTSYNC ac­tu­ally is

An ad­di­tional piece of the per­for­mance puz­zle

NTSYNC is a small piece of dri­ver added di­rectly to the Linux ker­nel that gives it a na­tive im­ple­men­ta­tion of a set of Windows-specific tools that games de­pend on to co­or­di­nate them­selves.

Modern games jug­gle dozens of things at once. While you’re play­ing, your CPU man­ages the ren­der­ing pipeline, load­ing as­sets, run­ning physics, pro­cess­ing au­dio, han­dling AI NPC rou­tines, and track­ing in­puts, all in par­al­lel across mul­ti­ple cores. All those jobs con­stantly have to co­or­di­nate so they don’t trip over each other.

Quiz

8 Questions · Test Your Knowledge

The his­tory of LinuxTrivia chal­lenge

From a Finnish stu­den­t’s side pro­ject to pow­er­ing the world — how well do you know the story of Linux?

OriginsKernelDistrosPioneersMilestones

Begin

01 / 8

Origins

In what year did Linus Torvalds first an­nounce the Linux ker­nel to the world?

A1989B1991C1993D1995

Correct! Linus Torvalds posted his now-fa­mous mes­sage to the comp.os.minix news­group on August 25, 1991, de­scrib­ing Linux as ‘just a hob­by’ pro­ject. Few could have pre­dicted it would one day run the ma­jor­ity of the world’s servers and smart­phones.

Not quite — Torvalds made his an­nounce­ment in 1991. He was a 21-year-old com­puter sci­ence stu­dent at the University of Helsinki at the time, and his mod­est post de­scribed the pro­ject as some­thing that ‘won’t be big and pro­fes­sion­al’ like GNU.

Continue

02 / 8

Pioneers

Which uni­ver­sity was Linus Torvalds at­tend­ing when he cre­ated the first ver­sion of the Linux ker­nel?

AStockholm UniversityBAalto UniversityCUniversity of HelsinkiDMIT

Correct! Torvalds was study­ing at the University of Helsinki in Finland when he be­gan work­ing on Linux as a per­sonal pro­ject, ini­tially in­spired by MINIX, a small Unix-like sys­tem used for ed­u­ca­tional pur­poses.

Not quite — Torvalds was a stu­dent at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He started Linux partly out of frus­tra­tion with the lim­i­ta­tions of MINIX, which his pro­fes­sor Andrew Tanenbaum had de­signed de­lib­er­ately to be sim­ple for teach­ing.

Continue

03 / 8

Kernel

What op­er­at­ing sys­tem pri­mar­ily in­spired Linus Torvalds to cre­ate the Linux ker­nel?

AMS-DOSBMINIXCBSD UnixDSolaris

Correct! MINIX, cre­ated by pro­fes­sor Andrew Tanenbaum, was the di­rect in­spi­ra­tion for Linux. Torvalds used MINIX on his new Intel 386 PC but found it too re­stricted for his needs, which pushed him to write his own ker­nel.

Not quite — the an­swer is MINIX. Torvalds was us­ing MINIX when he started Linux, and even held a fa­mous on­line de­bate with its cre­ator Andrew Tanenbaum about ker­nel de­sign phi­los­o­phy, specif­i­cally mono­lithic ver­sus mi­cro­ker­nel ar­chi­tec­tures.

Continue

04 / 8

Milestones

What was the ver­sion num­ber of the first pub­licly re­leased Linux ker­nel in 1991?

A0.01B0.1C1.0D0.99

Correct! Linux ver­sion 0.01 was the first ker­nel Torvalds re­leased pub­licly in September 1991. It was a rough, early build that could only run on Intel 386 hard­ware and had very lim­ited func­tion­al­ity, but it marked the true be­gin­ning of the Linux pro­ject.

Not quite — the first pub­lic re­lease was ver­sion 0.01 in September 1991. The ker­nel did­n’t reach ver­sion 1.0 un­til March 1994, by which point it had grown sig­nif­i­cantly in ca­pa­bil­ity and had at­tracted con­tri­bu­tions from de­vel­op­ers around the world.

Continue

05 / 8

Distros

Which Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion, first re­leased in 1993, is one of the old­est still ac­tively main­tained to­day?

AUbuntuBFedoraCSlackwareDDebian

Correct! Slackware, cre­ated by Patrick Volkerding, was first re­leased in July 1993, mak­ing it one of the old­est sur­viv­ing Linux dis­tri­b­u­tions. It is known for its sim­plic­ity and Unix-like phi­los­o­phy, and it con­tin­ues to be main­tained to this day.

Not quite — the an­swer is Slackware, re­leased in 1993 by Patrick Volkerding. While Debian was also founded in 1993, Slackware nar­rowly edges it out as the older re­lease. Ubuntu did­n’t ar­rive un­til 2004, and Fedora launched in 2003.

Continue

06 / 8

Origins

The GNU Project, which pro­vided many tools that paired with the Linux ker­nel, was founded by which de­vel­oper?

AEric RaymondBRichard StallmanCBruce PerensDIan Murdock

Correct! Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project in 1983 with the goal of cre­at­ing a com­pletely free Unix-like op­er­at­ing sys­tem. When the Linux ker­nel ap­peared in 1991, it filled the miss­ing piece GNU needed, and the com­bi­na­tion be­came what many call GNU/Linux.

Not quite — it was Richard Stallman who founded the GNU Project in 1983. Stallman is also known for cre­at­ing the GPL (GNU General Public License) and found­ing the Free Software Foundation, two pil­lars that shaped the le­gal and philo­soph­i­cal foun­da­tion of free soft­ware.

Continue

07 / 8

Milestones

Which com­pany re­leased a land­mark com­mer­cial Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion in 1994, help­ing bring Linux into the en­ter­prise world?

ACanonicalBSUSECRed HatDMandriva

Correct! Red Hat re­leased its first Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion in 1994 and be­came one of the most in­flu­en­tial com­mer­cial Linux com­pa­nies in his­tory. It pi­o­neered the en­ter­prise Linux mar­ket and was even­tu­ally ac­quired by IBM in 2019 for ap­prox­i­mately $34 bil­lion.

Not quite — Red Hat is the an­swer. Founded by Marc Ewing and Bob Young, Red Hat helped prove that com­pa­nies could build sus­tain­able busi­nesses around open-source soft­ware. SUSE Linux also launched in 1994, mak­ing it a close ri­val, but Red Hat be­came the more glob­ally dom­i­nant en­ter­prise force.

Continue

08 / 8

Distros

Ubuntu Linux, one of the most pop­u­lar desk­top dis­tri­b­u­tions, is based on which other Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion?

AArch LinuxBFedoraCDebianDGentoo

Correct! Ubuntu is based on Debian and was first re­leased in October 2004 by Mark Shuttleworth’s com­pany Canonical. It was de­signed to make Linux more ac­ces­si­ble to every­day users, and its six-month re­lease cy­cle and long-term sup­port ver­sions made it a fa­vorite for both desk­tops and servers.

Not quite — Ubuntu is built on top of Debian. Debian it­self was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock and is known for its strict com­mit­ment to free soft­ware and sta­bil­ity. Ubuntu in­her­its Debian’s pack­age man­age­ment sys­tem (APT and .deb pack­ages) but adds its own user-friendly layer on top.

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Windows han­dles this co­or­di­na­tion by us­ing a spe­cific set of mech­a­nisms, and be­fore NTSYNC, Wine had to mimic these mech­a­nisms us­ing things like esync and fsync, which both worked, but did­n’t al­ways match Windows ex­actly. NTSYNC builds these mech­a­nisms straight into the Linux ker­nel for the first time, and it means Wine does­n’t have to em­u­late any­thing any­more. The de­vel­oper-fac­ing API calls don’t ac­tu­ally change, Linux just knows how to an­swer them na­tively.

Related

NTSYNC is part of a grow­ing pat­tern

Not the first time Linux has in­her­ited fea­tures be­cause of Windows

NTSYNC is­n’t the first time Linux has gained a new fea­ture specif­i­cally be­cause Windows games needed it. A few years back, Linux added a way for soft­ware to wait on sev­eral events at once, which is some­thing Windows had built in for decades, but Linux did­n’t. Wine had been work­ing around the gap with awk­ward tricks un­til the ker­nel fi­nally got na­tive sup­port.

This work is dri­ven by Valve, by CodeWeavers (the com­pany that em­ploys many of the core Wine de­vel­op­ers, in­clud­ing NTSYNC’s au­thor Elizabeth Figura), and by a steady stream of con­trib­u­tors who want Linux to be a real gam­ing plat­form with­out de­pend­ing on out-of-ecosys­tem patches for­ever.

Related

These aren’t mag­i­cal per­for­mance gains

fsync was al­ready pretty good

The head­line per­for­mance gains look great, but they need some con­text. The eye-catch­ing 40 to 200 per­cent FPS gains cited in NTSYNC’s orig­i­nal bench­marks were mea­sured against un­mod­i­fied up­stream Wine, which al­most no­body uses to play games on Linux any­more. Most Linux gamers, in­clud­ing every Steam Deck owner, use Proton, which al­ready has fsync. Compared to fsync, NTSYNC’s per­for­mance gains are far more mod­est. The games that ben­e­fit most from the change to NTSYNC are games that were re­ally strug­gling be­fore. Anything that was run­ning at de­cent fram­er­ates be­fore­hand is still go­ing to run fine.

Related

These 7 Linux myths you still be­lieve sim­ply aren’t true

Linux is a com­pletely dif­fer­ent beast than it was a decade ago.

Valve adopted it any­way

It’s a great sign

Pierre-Loup Griffais, an en­gi­neer at Valve, has gone on the record to say that fsync was al­ready fast enough, and de­spite that, Valve still shipped NTSYNC in sta­ble SteamOS in March any­way, which speaks to the fact that fsync is still a workaround at its core, and can be the cause of is­sues out­side of poor raw FPS.

These old workarounds got sub­tle edge cases wrong in ways that pro­duced oc­ca­sional hitches, dead­locks, or weird be­hav­ior in spe­cific games, which are bugs that don’t show up on bench­mark charts but can ab­solutely ruin in­di­vid­ual ex­pe­ri­ences. NTSYNC fixes those at the source by match­ing Windows be­hav­ior ex­actly, and that means as soon as your fa­vorite dis­tro moves to the new ker­nel ver­sion, whether it be Bazzite, CachyOS, Fedora, or a fla­vor of Ubuntu, they all get this much-needed fix.

Related

4 rea­sons Valve’s full SteamOS re­lease will change PC gam­ing again

Valve’s full SteamOS re­lease will change PC gam­ing again, and here are some of the most im­por­tant ways.

Gaming on Linux con­tin­ues to im­prove by the month

Linux has grown so much in the gam­ing de­part­ment. Where there once was noth­ing but clever Wine patches and com­mu­nity workarounds now lies sup­port from gam­ing be­he­moths like Valve, dri­ving changes to the Linux ker­nel it­self. NTSYNC won’t be the last time a piece of Windows gets re­built in­side Linux be­cause gamers needed it, and with more than five per­cent of Steam’s user base now run­ning Linux, the in­cen­tive to keep do­ing it has never been stronger.

May 19, 2026

Gemini 3.5 is built to help you ex­e­cute com­plex, agen­tic work­flows.

In this story

Gemini 3.5 Flash

Frontier in­tel­li­gence, ex­cep­tional speed

Agentic tasks at scale

Richer graph­ics

Real-world im­pact

Personal AI agents

Built with Frontier safe­guards

Available to­day

Today, we’re in­tro­duc­ing Gemini 3.5, our lat­est fam­ily of mod­els com­bin­ing fron­tier in­tel­li­gence with ac­tion. This rep­re­sents a ma­jor leap for­ward in build­ing more ca­pa­ble, in­tel­li­gent agents. We’re kick­ing off the se­ries by re­leas­ing 3.5 Flash. It de­liv­ers fron­tier per­for­mance for agents and cod­ing, ex­celling at com­plex long-hori­zon tasks that de­liver real-world util­ity.

3.5 Flash is avail­able to­day to bil­lions of peo­ple glob­ally:

For every­one via the Gemini app and AI Mode in Google Search

For de­vel­op­ers in our agent-first de­vel­op­ment plat­form Google Antigravity and Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Android Studio

For en­ter­prises in Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and Gemini Enterprise.

We’re also hard at work on 3.5 Pro. It’s al­ready be­ing used in­ter­nally, and we look for­ward to rolling it out next month.

3.5 Flash: fron­tier per­for­mance for agents and cod­ing

Gemini 3.5 Flash de­liv­ers in­tel­li­gence that ri­vals large flag­ship mod­els on mul­ti­ple di­men­sions, at the speeds you have come to ex­pect from the Flash se­ries. It’s our strongest agen­tic and cod­ing model yet, out­per­form­ing Gemini 3.1 Pro on chal­leng­ing cod­ing and agen­tic bench­marks like Terminal-Bench 2.1 (76.2%), GDPval-AA (1656 Elo) and MCP Atlas (83.6%), and lead­ing in mul­ti­modal un­der­stand­ing (84.2% on CharXiv Reasoning). When look­ing at out­put to­kens per sec­ond, it is 4 times faster than other fron­tier mod­els.

Landing in the top-right quad­rant of the Artificial Analysis in­dex, 3.5 Flash de­liv­ers fron­tier-level in­tel­li­gence at ex­cep­tional speed — prov­ing you no longer have to trade qual­ity for la­tency.

3.5 Flash: agen­tic tasks at scale

This bal­ance of speed and per­for­mance makes 3.5 Flash ideal for tack­ling long-hori­zon agen­tic tasks. What used to take a de­vel­oper days or an au­di­tor weeks, 3.5 Flash can now help com­plete in a frac­tion of the time, of­ten at less than half the cost of other fron­tier mod­els. It rapidly plans, builds and it­er­ates to solve real-world prob­lems, whether it’s de­vel­op­ing new ap­pli­ca­tions, main­tain­ing code­bases or help­ing to pre­pare fi­nan­cial doc­u­ments.

When cou­pled with the up­dated Antigravity har­ness, 3.5 Flash be­comes a pow­er­ful en­gine for de­ploy­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive sub­agents to tackle prob­lems at scale for the most de­mand­ing use cases. Under su­per­vi­sion, it can re­li­ably ex­e­cute multi-step work­flows and cod­ing tasks while sus­tain­ing fron­tier per­for­mance.

Powered by Antigravity, 3.5 Flash ex­e­cutes multi-step work­flows to au­to­mat­i­cally re­name and cat­e­go­rize un­struc­tured as­sets based on dy­namic cri­te­ria.

Leveraging Antigravity, 3.5 Flash uses two agents to syn­the­size the AlphaZero pa­per and code a fully playable game in six hours.

3.5 Flash uses the Antigravity har­ness to trans­form a messy legacy code­base to Next.js.

3.5 Flash uses sub­agents to cre­ate new city land­scapes in Antigravity.

3.5 Flash uses two agents: a builder and a player, work­ing in a rapid self-im­prove­ment loop to de­velop a game in Antigravity.

Building on the strong mul­ti­modal foun­da­tion of Gemini 3, 3.5 Flash gen­er­ates richer, more in­ter­ac­tive web UIs and graph­ics.

3.5 Flash cre­ates in­ter­ac­tive an­i­ma­tions for a re­search pa­per on AI Studio.

3.5 Flash turns a plain text de­scrip­tion into in­ter­ac­tive hard­ware on AI Studio.

3.5 Flash ex­e­cutes mul­ti­ple con­cepts in par­al­lel to build a full brand­ing con­cept for a school fundraiser on AI Studio.

3.5 Flash gen­er­ates dif­fer­ent UX ap­proaches for a check­out flow in just 60 sec­onds on AI Studio.

3.5 Flash: real-world im­pact

3.5 Flash’s real-world agen­tic ca­pa­bil­i­ties are al­ready dri­ving mean­ing­ful progress for our de­vel­op­ers and en­ter­prises alike. In de­vel­op­ing the 3.5 model se­ries, we worked closely with in­dus­try part­ners to un­der­stand where toil and com­plex­ity arose in their work­flows. Partners are see­ing mean­ing­ful im­pact — from banks and fin­techs au­tomat­ing multi-week work­flows to data sci­ence teams un­earthing in­sights amidst com­plex data en­vi­ron­ments.

Shopify is run­ning sub­agents in par­al­lel to an­a­lyze com­plex data over a long hori­zon for more ac­cu­rate mer­chant growth fore­casts at a global scale.

Macquarie Bank is pi­lot­ing how 3.5 Flash can ac­cel­er­ate cus­tomer on­board­ing by rea­son­ing over com­plex 100+ page doc­u­ments, re­triev­ing rel­e­vant in­for­ma­tion and mak­ing re­li­able rec­om­men­da­tions with low la­tency.

Salesforce is in­te­grat­ing 3.5 Flash into Agentforce to re­li­ably au­to­mate com­pli­cated en­ter­prise tasks by de­ploy­ing mul­ti­ple sub­agents that re­tain con­text and ex­e­cute com­plex, multi-turn tool call­ing.

3.5 Flash is help­ing Ramp en­able smarter, more re­li­able OCR through mul­ti­modal un­der­stand­ing of com­plex in­voices com­bined with rea­son­ing over his­tor­i­cal pat­terns.

Xero is de­ploy­ing agents to au­tonomously man­age com­plex, multi-week work­flows, such as iden­ti­fy­ing sup­pli­ers and gath­er­ing in­for­ma­tion for 1099 tax forms, en­abling small busi­nesses to au­to­mate te­dious ad­min tasks.

Databricks is us­ing agen­tic work­flows to mon­i­tor and re­trieve real-time in­for­ma­tion, rea­son across mas­sive datasets to di­ag­nose is­sues, iden­tify fixes and pro­pose so­lu­tions for data sci­en­tists.

Personal AI agents: built with 3.5 Flash

3.5 Flash is now the de­fault model for the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search glob­ally. At I/O to­day, we showed how its agen­tic ca­pa­bil­i­ties are pow­er­ing new fea­tures to bring fron­tier-level in­tel­li­gence to your daily life.

The new Gemini Spark, your per­sonal AI agent, uses 3.5 Flash. It runs 24/7, help­ing you nav­i­gate your dig­i­tal life, tak­ing ac­tion on your be­half while un­der your di­rec­tion. We’re start­ing to roll out Gemini Spark to trusted testers to­day, and we’re plan­ning on bring­ing the Beta to Google AI Ultra sub­scribers in the US next week.

Gemini Spark uses 3.5 Flash to help ac­com­plish these tasks

Gemini Spark uses 3.5 Flash to help ac­com­plish these tasks

Gemini Spark uses 3.5 Flash to help ac­com­plish these tasks

Gemini Spark uses 3.5 Flash to help ac­com­plish these tasks

Gemini Spark uses 3.5 Flash to help ac­com­plish these tasks

The en­hanced agen­tic cod­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties of 3.5 Flash are also de­liv­er­ing even more in­tel­li­gent ex­pe­ri­ences across Search, from in­tro­duc­ing new in­for­ma­tion agents that work for you 24/7 to un­lock­ing more dy­namic gen­er­a­tive UI ex­pe­ri­ences. Learn more in our blog post.

Search lever­ages 3.5 Flash to build an in­ter­ac­tive vi­sual ex­plain­ing Gyroid pat­terns.

Gemini 3.5: built with fron­tier safe­guards

Gemini 3.5 was de­vel­oped in ac­cor­dance with our Frontier Safety Framework. We have strength­ened our cy­ber and CBRN safe­guards, which means it’s less likely to gen­er­ate harm­ful con­tent, and to mis­tak­enly refuse to an­swer safe queries. We achieve this with new, more ad­vanced safety train­ing and mit­i­ga­tions, in­clud­ing in­ter­pretabil­ity tools that help check and un­der­stand the AI’s in­ner rea­son­ing be­fore it pro­vides a re­sponse.

3.5 Flash is avail­able to­day

Gemini 3.5 Flash is gen­er­ally avail­able via Google Antigravity, the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Android Studio, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and Gemini Enterprise. It’s also now avail­able to every­one in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search. On be­half of the en­tire Gemini team, we can’t wait to see what you build.

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This is a vir­tual mu­seum of op­er­at­ing sys­tems (and stand­alone ap­pli­ca­tions) run­ning un­der em­u­la­tion, im­ple­mented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM.

A cus­tom em­u­la­tor-in­de­pen­dent launcher is pro­vided, and all OSes and em­u­la­tors are pre-in­stalled and pre-con­fig­ured. The launcher in­cludes a snap­shot fea­ture to quickly re­vert bro­ken in­stal­la­tions back to a work­ing state. Hypervisor in­stallers and short­cuts to run the VM on Windows, ma­cOS, and Linux are also in­cluded.

Want to see the ear­li­est res­i­dent mon­i­tors? The an­ces­tor of all mod­ern OSes (CTSS)? The ear­li­est ver­sions of Unix? The first OS with a desk­top metaphor GUI (Xerox Star Pilot/ViewPoint)? Early ver­sions of main­stream OSes? If you want to ex­plore his­tor­i­cal OSes and plat­forms with­out hav­ing to worry about con­fig­ur­ing/​in­stalling em­u­la­tors and OSes or cor­rupt­ing em­u­lated in­stal­la­tions, you’ve come to the right place.

Just about every well-known OS and plat­form (and also a lot of ob­scure ones) is in­cluded in some form, span­ning the en­tire his­tory of stored-pro­gram com­put­ing from the Manchester Baby of 1948 (the first stored-pro­gram com­puter) to the pre­sent day.

The cat­a­logue cov­ers, among many other things:

The ear­li­est main­frames: Manchester Baby test/​demo pro­grams, Mark 1 Scheme A/B/C/T (the ear­li­est ex­am­ples of sys­tem soft­ware that could be con­sid­ered as an OS), var­i­ous EDSAC soft­ware, etc.

Later main­frames and mini­com­put­ers: CTSS, MVS, VM/370, TOPS-10/20, ITS, Multics, RSX, RSTS, and more

Workstations and Unix vari­ants: PERQ OSes, SunOS, IRIX, OSF/1, A/UX, NeXTSTEP, Plan 9, var­i­ous BSDs, plus Linux dis­tri­b­u­tions across the decades, and more

Home com­put­ers: var­i­ous CP/M vari­ants, Apple II, Commodore 8-bit ma­chines, Atari 8-bit, MSX, Tandy TRS-80, BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, Sharp MZ, and more

Personal com­puter op­er­at­ing sys­tems: var­i­ous DOS vari­ants, OS/2, BeOS, Windows from 1.0 to early Longhorn be­tas, clas­sic Mac OS through Mac OS X 10.5 PPC, and more

Mobile and em­bed­ded: PalmOS, EPOC/Symbian, Windows CE, Newton OS, early Android and iOS where em­u­la­tion per­mits, QNX, etc.

Research and ob­scure sys­tems: ZetaLisp, Smalltalk en­vi­ron­ments, Oberon, Plan 9, and many more that few peo­ple now have ever booted

If a work­ing ver­sion of an op­er­at­ing sys­tem ex­ists some­where, the goal is to have it here, in a form any­one can run on a rea­son­ably mod­ern lap­top/​desk­top.

By the Numbers

1700+

in­stalls

250+

plat­forms

570+

dis­tinct oses

1948-now

era

Downloads

Both a full and a lite ver­sion are avail­able. The full ver­sion ships with every­thing pre-down­loaded and runs of­fline. The lite ver­sion down­loads disk/​tape/​etc. im­ages for guest VMs the first time they are run. Automatic and man­ual up­dates are sup­ported on both edi­tions so new in­stal­la­tions land with­out re-down­load­ing the whole VM.

Download the Virtual OS Museum

Screenshots

0. Launcher main win­dow

1. Launcher VM info

2. Unix PC SVR2 and XVM RSX

AFROS (XaAES) 8.12 – 00 TeraDesk

AO-DOS 2.10 – 00 Intro

ATT Unix PC System V R2 3.51m - 00 File Manager and Terminal

A_UX 3.1.1 – 00 Finder with util­i­ties

Amiga UNIX (AMIX) 2.1c - 00 OpenLook desk­top with ap­pli­ca­tions

CP_M for PSI98 2.2 (6.31-Z) - 00 DIR

CSIDOS 3.32 – 00 Intro

Coherent 4.2.14 – 00 olwm with ap­pli­ca­tions

Domain_OS SR10.4 – 01 VUE desk­top

E_OS LX 0.2.5 – 00 Terminal

FlexOS 2.3 (COROS LS-B 4.01) - 03 About

GNO_ME 2.0.6 – 01 TMTerm

HP-UX 11i v1 (B.11.11) - 00 CDE with util­i­ties

Human68K 3.02 – 00 LHES

IBM 1130 DMS V2M12 - 00 LET list­ing

IBM OS_2 (Extended Edition) 1.1 – 00 Desktop Manager

IRIX 6.5.22m - 00 IMD with ap­pli­ca­tions

Inferno Fourth Edition (20100115) - 00 GUI with ap­pli­ca­tions

LisaOS 3.1 – 02 LisaDraw

MOS for BBC Master Compact 5.10 (Base) - 02 Desktop

Mac OS (Classic) 1.0 al­pha; Sony Test (System ‘7.0’, Finder 1983 – 10-04) - 00 Finder

Mac OS 9.0.4 – 00 Finder, Internet Explorer,and Help

Mach386 2.6 1.0 (X108_MSD) - 00 X11 with ap­pli­ca­tions

Minerva 1.98 (QL_E (shares disk im­ages with SMSQ_E QL_E)) - 00 Desktop with ap­pli­ca­tions

Minix 3.4.0rc6 – 00 X11 Terminal and Links

NeXTStep (68k) 3.3 – 00 Desktop with ap­pli­ca­tions

OS-9_x86 (a.k.a. OS-9000_x86) 6.1 – 00 XiBase

PSI-OS 12.2 – 00 Start

Plan 9 4th Edition - 01 acme filesys­tem server

QNX 1.2 – 00 boot

RISC OS 3.11 (Minimal (Old boot)) - 00 Desktop with ap­pli­ca­tions

SILLIAC soft­ware col­lec­tion - 00 Blob demo

SINIX (PC-X) 1.2 – 01 Login Prompt

SX-WINDOW 3.1 – 00 Desktop

Sharp Personal CP_M for MZ-2500 (MZ-6Z001) 1.0a - 00 VCCP

Softlanding Linux System 1.0 – 00 ls un­ame and ker­nel source

Solaris_SPARC 9 (s9_58shwpl3) - 00 CDE ter­mi­nal help and file man­ager

Syllable 0.5.2 – 00 Desktop with ap­pli­ca­tions

SymbOS 1.0 Beta - 01 About

Tru64 UNIX 5.1B - 00 CDE with util­i­ties

ULTRIX_VAX 4.0 – 00 DECwindows with ap­pli­ca­tions

UNICOS 10.0.0.2 – 01 X11 with util­i­ties

More screen­shots

Why this ex­ists

While the state of soft­ware preser­va­tion has im­proved sig­nif­i­cantly over the past two decades, many of the ex­ist­ing soft­ware preser­va­tion pro­jects are still not par­tic­u­larly ac­ces­si­ble.

When I started col­lect­ing em­u­la­tor im­ages (2003), there were only a few small archives of soft­ware im­ages and the cor­re­spond­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion, and rel­a­tively few em­u­la­tors for any­thing other than well-known con­sumer-ori­ented plat­forms. Nowadays there are many large archives of his­tor­i­cal soft­ware and doc­u­men­ta­tion, and a lot of em­u­la­tors for even a lot of very ob­scure plat­forms.

However, while such ef­forts are valu­able when it comes to keep­ing his­tor­i­cal soft­ware avail­able and runnable (and with­out them this pro­ject would have never been pos­si­ble; see the cred­its page for a list of em­u­la­tors, pre-in­stalled im­ages, and me­dia archives I have used), it of­ten still takes time and ef­fort to get runnable VM in­stal­la­tions from them. OSes may have com­pli­cated in­stall pro­ce­dures. Some may de­pend on par­tic­u­lar de­vice con­fig­u­ra­tions within an em­u­la­tor. Some will only run in cer­tain em­u­la­tor ver­sions, break­ing in later ones due to re­gres­sions. Some em­u­la­tors might have com­plex con­fig­u­ra­tion files, or may re­quire a spe­cific en­vi­ron­ment on the host sys­tem.

This pro­ject is an at­tempt to keep reach­able as much of the his­tory that’s been pre­served in var­i­ous places as pos­si­ble. Not the­o­ret­i­cally reach­able. Not “bootable in prin­ci­ple if you as­sem­ble the right tool­chain on a Tuesday.” Reachable. You click an en­try, it runs, and where pos­si­ble it runs with soft­ware of the era al­ready loaded the way some­one might ac­tu­ally have used the ma­chine at the time.

The work be­hind it

This is the re­sult of over 20 years of col­lect­ing. OS in­stal­la­tions have been sourced from var­i­ous places. Some have been down­loaded as pre-in­stalled im­ages, whereas oth­ers were in­stalled from im­ages of orig­i­nal in­stall me­dia. Some were in­stalled in less than an hour, whereas oth­ers took al­most a week.

A de­cent num­ber only run in par­tic­u­lar em­u­la­tor ver­sions due to re­gres­sions in later ver­sions, and some em­u­la­tors needed mi­nor patches to run on mod­ern Linux or to play nice with the launcher. A few em­u­la­tors have been patched to run OSes that were pre­vi­ously bro­ken.

Many in­stal­la­tions also in­clude var­i­ous add-on soft­ware - ap­pli­ca­tions, de­vel­op­ment tools, games, util­i­ties, etc. - set up the way it ac­tu­ally might have been used.

This is still far from fin­ished; I have many more im­ages sit­ting around that I have yet to in­stall and em­u­la­tors I want to fix; check out my YouTube chan­nel, blog, or BlueSky to see what I’m cur­rently work­ing on.

Support the pro­ject

This is a per­sonal pro­ject, run and cu­rated by one per­son, sus­tained by pa­tience and time. If you find it in­ter­est­ing, the eas­i­est ways to sup­port it are:

Patreon for on­go­ing sup­port

Ko-fi for one-off con­tri­bu­tions

Discord/Fluxer to talk about it, ask ques­tions, or sug­gest new plat­forms/​OSes to add (new en­tries may not be added im­me­di­ately since I’ve got a lot of stuff to add)

GitLab to sub­mit bug re­ports or patches re­lated to the launcher and scripts

Telling some­one who works on, writes about, or stud­ies the his­tory of com­put­ing that this ex­ists

19th May 2026

I put to­gether these an­no­tated slides from my five minute light­ning talk at PyCon US 2026, us­ing the lat­est it­er­a­tion of my an­no­tated pre­sen­ta­tion tool.

#

I pre­sented this light­ning talk at PyCon US 2026, at­tempt­ing to sum­ma­rize the last six months of de­vel­op­ments in LLMs in five min­utes.

#

Six months is a pretty con­ve­nient time pe­riod to cover, be­cause it cap­tures what I’ve been call­ing the November 2025 in­flec­tion point. November was a crit­i­cal month in LLMs, es­pe­cially for cod­ing.

#

For one thing, the sup­pos­edly “best” model (depending mostly on vibes) changed hands five times be­tween the three big providers.

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As al­ways, I’m us­ing my Generate an SVG of a pel­i­can rid­ing a bi­cy­cle test to help il­lus­trate the dif­fer­ences be­tween the mod­els.

Why this test? Because pel­i­cans are hard to draw, bi­cy­cles are hard to draw, pel­i­cans can’t ride bi­cy­cles… and there’s zero chance any AI lab would train a model for such a ridicu­lous task.

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At the start of November the widely ac­knowl­edged “best” model was Claude Sonnet 4.5, re­leased on 29th September. It drew me this pel­i­can.

In November it was over­taken by GPT-5.1, then Gemini 3, then GPT-5.1 Codex Max, and then Anthropic took the crown back again with Claude Opus 4.5.

I think Gemini 3 drew the best pel­i­can out of this lot, but pel­i­cans aren’t every­thing. Most prac­ti­tion­ers will agree that Opus 4.5 held the crown for the next cou­ple of months.

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It took a lit­tle while for this to be­come clear, but the real news from November was that the cod­ing agents got good.

OpenAI and Anthropic had spent most of 2025 run­ning Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards to in­crease the qual­ity of code writ­ten by their mod­els, es­pe­cially when paired up with their Codex and Claude Code agent har­nesses.

In November the re­sults of this work be­came ap­par­ent. Coding agents went from of­ten-work to mostly-work, cross­ing a qual­ity bar­rier where you could use them as a daily-dri­ver to get real work done, with­out need­ing to spend most of your time fix­ing their stu­pid mis­takes.

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Also in November, this hap­pened—the first com­mit to an ob­scure (back then) repo called “Warelay” by some guy called Pete.

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Over the hol­i­day pe­riod, from December to January, a whole lot of us took ad­van­tage of the break to have a poke at these new mod­els and cod­ing agents and see what they could do.

They could do a lot! Some of us got a lit­tle bit over-ex­cited. I had my own short-lived bout of a form of LLM psy­chosis as I started spin­ning up wildly am­bi­tious pro­jects to see how far I could push them.

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That play­ground demo shows JavaScript code run us­ing my mi­cro-javascript li­brary, in Python, run­ning in­side Pyodide, run­ning in WebAssembly, run­ning in JavaScript, run­ning in a browser!

It’s pretty cool! But did any­one out there need a buggy, slow, in­se­cure half-baked im­ple­men­ta­tion of JavaScript in Python?

They did not. I have quite a few other pro­jects from that hol­i­day pe­riod that I have since qui­etly re­tired!

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On to February. Remember that Warelay pro­ject that had its first com­mit at the end of November?

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In December and January it had gone through quite a few name changes… and by February it was tak­ing the world by storm un­der its fi­nal name, OpenClaw.

The amount of at­ten­tion it got is pretty as­ton­ish­ing for a pro­ject that was less than three months old.

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OpenClaw is a “personal AI as­sis­tant”, and we ac­tu­ally got a generic term for these, based on NanoClaw and ZeroClaw and such­like… they’re called Claws.

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Mac Minis started to sell out around Silicon Valley, be­cause peo­ple were buy­ing them to run their Claws.

Drew Breunig joked to me that this is be­cause they’re the new dig­i­tal pets, and a Mac Mini is the per­fect aquar­ium for your Claw.

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My favourite metaphor for Claws is Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock in the 2004 movie Spider-Man 2. His claws were pow­ered by AI, and were per­fectly safe pro­vided noth­ing dam­aged his in­hibitor chip… af­ter which they turned evil and took over.

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Also in February: Gemini 3.1 Pro came out, and drew me a re­ally good pel­i­can rid­ing a bi­cy­cle. Look at this! It’s even got a fish in its bas­ket.

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And then Google’s Jeff Dean tweeted this video of an an­i­mated pel­i­can rid­ing a bi­cy­cle, plus a frog on a penny-far­thing and a gi­raffe dri­ving a tiny car and an os­trich on roller skates and a tur­tle kick­flip­ping a skate­board and a dachs­hund dri­ving a stretch lim­ou­sine.

So maybe the AI labs have been pay­ing at­ten­tion af­ter all!

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A lot of stuff hap­pened just in the past month.

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Google re­leased the Gemma 4 se­ries of mod­els, which are the most ca­pa­ble open weight mod­els I’ve seen from a US com­pany.

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Also last month, Chinese AI lab GLM came out with GLM-5.1—an open weight 1.5TB mon­ster! This is a very ef­fec­tive model… if you can af­ford the hard­ware to run it.

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GLM-5.1 drew me this very com­pe­tent pel­i­can on a bi­cy­cle.

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… though when it tried to an­i­mate it the bi­cy­cle bounced off into the top and the bi­cy­cle got warped.

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Charles on Bluesky sug­gested I try it with a North Virginia Opossum on an E-scooter

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And it did this! I’ve tried this on other mod­els and they don’t even come close. “Cruising the com­mon­wealth since dusk” is per­fect. It’s an­i­mated too.

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Here’s that Claude Sonnet 4.5 pel­i­can from September for com­par­i­son.

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So those were the two main themes of the past six months. The cod­ing agents got re­ally good… and the lap­top-avail­able mod­els, while a lot weaker than the fron­tier, have started wildly out­per­form­ing ex­pec­ta­tions.

In the con­text of con­cerns around young peo­ple’s in­ter­ac­tions with dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies, the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is con­sult­ing on ad­di­tional mea­sures to pre­pare young peo­ple for grow­ing up in a dig­i­tal world. Before the back­drop of users cir­cum­vent­ing age as­sur­ance sys­tems man­dated un­der the UK’s Online Safety Act, the con­sul­ta­tion con­sid­ers age-gat­ing vir­tual pri­vate net­works (VPNs).

Mozilla’s mis­sion is grounded in the be­lief that the in­ter­net must re­main open and ac­ces­si­ble to all, and that pri­vacy and se­cu­rity on­line are fun­da­men­tal hu­man rights. We rec­og­nize that the pro­tec­tion of young peo­ple on­line is one of the most press­ing and chal­leng­ing ques­tions of our time, and we are com­mit­ted to sup­port­ing pol­icy pro­pos­als that ad­dress the root causes of on­line harms. We are con­cerned, how­ever, that blunt in­ter­ven­tions like manda­tory age as­sur­ance and re­strict­ing ac­cess to tools like VPNs are not ef­fec­tive in im­prov­ing the pro­tec­tion af­forded to young peo­ple on­line, while un­der­min­ing the fun­da­men­tal rights of all users.

VPNs serve as crit­i­cal pri­vacy and se­cu­rity tools for users across all ages. By hid­ing users’ IP ad­dresses, VPNs help pro­tect users’ lo­ca­tion, re­duce track­ing and avoid IP-based pro­fil­ing. People use VPNs for lots of dif­fer­ent rea­sons: to con­nect to their school’s or em­ploy­er’s net­work re­motely, to avoid cen­sor­ship or to sim­ply pro­tect their pri­vacy and se­cu­rity on­line. While be­ing able to ac­cess VPNs is es­pe­cially im­por­tant for vul­ner­a­ble groups like ac­tivists, dis­si­dents or jour­nal­ists, VPNs im­prove every­one’s base­line pro­tec­tion on­line.

Young peo­ple are par­tic­u­larly vul­ner­a­ble to on­line track­ing, tar­geted ad­ver­tis­ing, and the risks that flow from per­sonal data be­ing col­lected and processed for com­mer­cial pur­poses with­out ad­e­quate con­sent or trans­parency. In a world in which young peo­ple are in­ter­act­ing with dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies as part of their re­al­i­ties from young ages on­ward, re­strict­ing young peo­ple’s ac­cess to pri­vacy-pro­tect­ing tech­nolo­gies is in ten­sion with the goal of equip­ping them to nav­i­gate the in­ter­net safely and com­pe­tently. In or­der to be able to de­velop agency and re­spon­si­ble habits in en­gag­ing with dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies, it is cru­cial for young peo­ple to be in­tro­duced to best prac­tices and key safety and pri­vacy tools as they en­gage with the on­line world.

Rather than age-gat­ing tech­nolo­gies like VPNs, we be­lieve that reg­u­la­tors should ad­dress the root causes of on­line harm by hold­ing plat­forms to ac­count, en­cour­ag­ing the re­spon­si­ble use of parental con­trols and in­vest­ing in dig­i­tal skills and a whole of so­ci­ety ap­proach to dig­i­tal well­be­ing.

Read our full sub­mis­sion to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

Minnesota has en­acted the most far-reach­ing crack­down on mas­sively pop­u­lar ser­vices like Kalshi and Polymarket.

Steve Karnowski/Associated Press

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Steve Karnowski/Associated Press

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has signed the na­tion’s first law ban­ning pre­dic­tion mar­ket sites from op­er­at­ing in the state, and in re­sponse, the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion has sued, tee­ing up a le­gal bat­tle over the most far-reach­ing crack­down on pop­u­lar ser­vices like Kalshi and Polymarket.

It comes as states con­front a grow­ing stand­off with the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion over how to reg­u­late the in­dus­try, which al­lows peo­ple to bet on vir­tu­ally any­thing.

The new state law makes it a crime to host or ad­ver­tise a pre­dic­tion mar­ket, which it de­fines as a sys­tem that lets con­sumers place a wa­ger on a fu­ture out­come, like sports, elec­tions, live en­ter­tain­ment, some­one’s word choice and world af­fairs.

The pro­hi­bi­tion ex­tends to ser­vices sup­port­ing pre­dic­tion mar­kets, like vir­tual pri­vate net­works, that could al­low con­sumers to dis­guise their lo­ca­tion and get around the ban.

It would force pre­dic­tion mar­ket sites like Kalshi and Polymarket to leave the state, or face pos­si­ble felony charges. The law takes ef­fect in August.

“We as a state should de­cide how best and what reg­u­la­tions we think should at­tach to gam­bling, to pro­tect pub­lic safety, to pro­tect our kids,” said Minnesota Rep. Emma Greenman, the Democrat who in­tro­duced the mea­sure.

The law has a carve-out for event con­tracts that serve as an in­sur­ance pol­icy in the event of “harm, or loss sus­tained” and for the pur­chase of se­cu­ri­ties and other com­modi­ties.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s law­suit seeks to block the law be­fore it starts, ar­gu­ing the pre­dic­tion mar­ket in­dus­try should be ex­clu­sively reg­u­lated by fed­eral of­fi­cials.

“This Minnesota law turns law­ful op­er­a­tors and par­tic­i­pants in pre­dic­tion mar­kets into felons overnight,” said CFTC Chairman Michael Selig. “Minnesota farm­ers have re­lied on crit­i­cal hedg­ing prod­ucts on weather and crop-re­lated events for decades to mit­i­gate their risks. Governor Walz chose to put spe­cial in­ter­ests first and American farm­ers and in­no­va­tors last.”

An up­dated ver­sion of the pre­dic­tion mar­ket bill al­lows trad­ing on weather, an ex­cep­tion that fol­lowed push­back from the agri­cul­tural in­dus­try, which has his­tor­i­cally used fu­tures trad­ing on weather as a hedge against storms and other in­clement weather that can af­fect a har­vest. Walz is ex­pected to sign it soon.

Besides Minnesota, bills crack­ing down on the pre­dic­tion mar­ket in­dus­try have been in­tro­duced in 14 other states, ac­cord­ing to the National Conference of State Legislators. Two of those states, Hawaii and North Carolina, have pend­ing bills seek­ing to ban the in­dus­try statewide.

Experts say the cloud of le­gal un­cer­tainty hang­ing over pre­dic­tion mar­kets apps have not slowed their rapid growth.

“The states are us­ing any tac­tic they can to go af­ter the pre­dic­tion mar­ket com­pa­nies,” said Melinda Roth, a pro­fes­sor at Washington and Lee University’s School of Law, who stud­ies the in­dus­try. “But they’ve em­barked on a too big to fail strat­egy and have be­come quite main­stream,” she said. “It will be hard to put that ge­nie back in the bot­tle.”

A le­gal fight over the Minnesota ban is ex­pected. Questions over whether states or the fed­eral gov­ern­ment should over­see the pre­dic­tion mar­ket in­dus­try have al­ready trig­gered more than 20 law­suits. One of those cases, in Nevada, led to Kalshi paus­ing its sports bet­ting in the state af­ter a judge found it “indistinguishable” from state-reg­u­lated sports gam­bling.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has filed fed­eral law­suits against five states, in­clud­ing Arizona, Wisconsin and New York, at­tempt­ing to over­ride state reg­u­la­tors’ at­tempts to rein in the bet­ting sites.

The CFTC has ar­gued it has ex­clu­sive ju­ris­dic­tion over pre­dic­tion mar­kets, even though for­mer CFTC mem­bers and le­gal ex­perts say bets on foot­ball games, words President Trump might say dur­ing a press con­fer­ence and whether Ricky Martin will make an ap­pear­ance at the Super Bowl are mat­ters far out­side its tra­di­tional scope.

In a state­ment to NPR, Kalshi spokes­woman Elisabeth Diana said ban­ning pre­dic­tion mar­kets is a “blatant vi­o­la­tion” of the law.

“Minnesota ban­ning pre­dic­tion mar­kets is like try­ing to ban the New York Stock Exchange,” said Diana, adding that “this ac­tively harms users be­cause it re­duces com­pe­ti­tion and dri­ves ac­tiv­ity off­shore.”

A Polymarket spokesman told NPR that Minnesota’s ban runs counter to the fed­eral gov­ern­men­t’s “established frame­work” for reg­u­lat­ing pre­dic­tion mar­kets.

Tribal-owned casi­nos op­er­ate in Minnesota, but on­line gam­bling and sports bet­ting are not le­gal in the state.

Prediction mar­kets like Kalshi and Polymarket have given ac­cess to sports bet­ting to peo­ple in states where the ac­tiv­ity is pro­hib­ited, since the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion reg­u­lates the sites as a type of “event con­tract,” rather than gam­bling, which typ­i­cally is over­seen by state gam­ing au­thor­i­ties.

Nonetheless, sports gam­bling pow­ers the sites. On Kalshi, for in­stance, more than 85% of trad­ing ac­tiv­ity is re­lated to a sport­ing event, some of those trades be­ing “parlays,” high-risk wa­gers that mul­ti­ple things, points scored, fouls, passes, will all hap­pen.

Bettors on the sites are mak­ing bil­lions of dol­lars in trades every week, even as ques­tions around in­sider trad­ing and how the mar­kets can cre­ate per­verse in­cen­tives for peo­ple to ma­nip­u­late real world out­comes con­tinue to vex the com­pa­nies.

Minnesota Public Radio News re­porters Dana Ferguson and Peter Cox con­tributed re­port­ing to this story.

Apple also an­nounced new fea­tures for con­trol­ling power wheel­chairs with Apple Vision Pro and gen­er­at­ing sub­ti­tles across the Apple ecosys­tem, all com­ing later this year

VoiceOver and Magnifier Can Explore More

A Mac screen dis­play­ing a source doc­u­ment with a com­plex lay­out and small text.

The Mac screen show­ing the doc­u­ment re­for­mat­ted by Accessibility Reader with larger, clearer text in a sin­gle col­umn.

Generated Subtitles for Video

Additional Updates

Vehicle Motion Cues come to vi­sionOS, which can help re­duce mo­tion sick­ness for peo­ple who use Apple Vision Pro as a pas­sen­ger in a mov­ing ve­hi­cle. Vision Pro will also sup­port face ges­tures for per­form­ing taps and sys­tem ac­tions, plus a new way to se­lect el­e­ments with one’s eyes while us­ing Dwell Control.

Touch Accommodations pro­vide a new way to per­son­al­ize setup in iOS and iPa­dOS.

Made for iPhone hear­ing aids pair and hand off be­tween Apple de­vices more re­li­ably, with an im­proved setup ex­pe­ri­ence in iOS, iPa­dOS, ma­cOS, and vi­sionOS.

Larger Text sup­port is com­ing to tvOS, so view­ers who have low vi­sion can in­crease on­screen text size to be eas­ier to read.

The Apple TV in­ter­face shows a menu for the show “Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age” with the stan­dard text size.

The Apple TV in­ter­face shows a con­trol for in­creas­ing the text size.

The Apple TV in­ter­face shows a menu for the show “Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age” with a larger text size.

Name Recognition, which can no­tify users who are deaf or hard of hear­ing if some­one says their name, works across more than 50 lan­guages glob­ally.

For sign lan­guage in­ter­pre­ta­tion app de­vel­op­ers, a new API sup­ports users in adding a hu­man in­ter­preter to an on­go­ing FaceTime video call.

Those with dif­fi­culty in­ter­act­ing with tra­di­tional con­trollers can now con­nect the Sony Access con­troller as a game con­troller with iOS, iPa­dOS, and ma­cOS. Users can con­fig­ure the thumb­stick, nine built-in but­tons, and up to four ad­di­tional ex­ter­nal but­tons or spe­cialty switches to per­son­al­ize lay­out. They can also com­bine two con­trollers for a deeply per­son­al­ized gam­ing ex­pe­ri­ence.

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Text of this ar­ti­cle

Media in this ar­ti­cle

Media in this ar­ti­cle

Apple Intelligence is avail­able in beta with sup­port for these lan­guages: English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Japanese, and Korean. Some fea­tures may not be avail­able in all re­gions or lan­guages. For fea­ture and lan­guage avail­abil­ity and sys­tem re­quire­ments, see sup­port.ap­ple.com/​en-us/​121115.

VoiceOver and Magnifier should not be re­lied upon in cir­cum­stances where one could be harmed or in­jured, in high-risk sit­u­a­tions, for nav­i­ga­tion, or for the di­ag­no­sis or treat­ment of any med­ical con­di­tion.

Voice Control pow­ered by Apple Intelligence will be avail­able in English in the U.S., Canada, the UK, and Australia.

Generated sub­ti­tles will be avail­able in English in the U.S. and Canada.

The fea­ture and Apple Vision Pro are in­tended for use in con­trolled en­vi­ron­ments. For more in­for­ma­tion, visit sup­port.ap­ple.com/​en-us/​118507.

A wired con­nec­tion re­quires the pur­chase of the Apple Vision Pro Developer Strap.

Customers can pur­chase the Hikawa Grip & Stand for iPhone on ap­ple.com in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates, the UK, and the U.S.

Back in March, I wrote about Bitwarden dou­bling their Premium price — and specif­i­cally how they did it. Buried in a fea­ture an­nounce­ment. Priced in fake monthly in­cre­ments for a prod­uct that has never once of­fered monthly billing. Communicated to ex­ist­ing cus­tomers fif­teen days be­fore their re­newal, not be­fore.

Bitwarden re­sponded on Mastodon. They con­firmed every­thing in my post while ap­par­ently think­ing they were de­fend­ing them­selves. I noted at the time that the re­sponse was its own data point.

Well. There’s more data now.

The Changing of the Guard

In February, as Fast Company re­ported, long­time CEO Michael Crandell qui­etly tran­si­tioned to an ad­vi­sory role. No an­nounce­ment from the com­pany. You’d only know it hap­pened if you went look­ing on LinkedIn. Crandell had been with Bitwarden since 2019 — back when they were still the scrappy un­der­dog that every­one flocked to when LastPass started pulling the rug.

His re­place­ment is Michael Sullivan, for­mer CEO of Acquia and Insightsoftware. Sullivan’s LinkedIn page leads with his ex­pe­ri­ence in “all facets of merg­ers and ac­qui­si­tions, in­clud­ing di­rect ex­pe­ri­ence with lead­ing PE firms.”

In plain English: M&A is the busi­ness of buy­ing and sell­ing com­pa­nies. Private eq­uity firms buy busi­nesses, cut costs, grow rev­enue, and sell them at a profit. They’re not there to run a soft­ware com­pany long-term — they’re man­ag­ing an in­vest­ment to­ward an exit. The peo­ple hired to run those com­pa­nies are hired specif­i­cally be­cause they know how that process works.

That’s the new CEO of your pass­word man­ager. That’s what he leads with.

CFO Stephen Morrison also de­parted in April, re­placed by for­mer InVision CEO Michael Shenkman. Kyle Spearrin — who started build­ing Bitwarden as a hobby pro­ject in 2015 be­cause he was wor­ried about what would hap­pen to LastPass un­der new own­er­ship — re­mains as CTO.

The irony is al­most too much to type.

The Website Is Remodeling Too

The phrase “Always free” dis­ap­peared from the per­sonal pass­word man­ager page in mid-April. It used to sit promi­nently un­der the plan se­lec­tor. The free plan still ex­ists — for now — but the com­mit­ment lan­guage is gone.

And then there’s the val­ues rewrite.

Bitwarden used to de­fine its cul­ture with the acronym GRIT: Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion, and Trans­parency. After May 4th, that changed. GRIT now stands for Gratitude, Responsibility, Innovation, and Trust.

Inclusion and Transparency are out. Innovation and Trust are in.

Did They Announce Any of This?

I looked hard.

Their blog has noth­ing about the new CEO. No press re­lease about the val­ues change. No ded­i­cated post about “Always free” be­ing re­tired as a promise. The press room is silent on all of it.

There is one thing. A 2022 blog post by Crandell — “Defining and sus­tain­ing value for Bitwarden users” — was qui­etly edited. The GRIT list in the body now shows the new val­ues: Innovation and Trust. But the ex­plana­tory para­graph at the bot­tom of the same post still says the old ones: Inclusion and Transparency. Crandell’s name is still on it. The post now con­tra­dicts it­self, and no­body wrote a new one.

That’s their an­nounce­ment. A half-scrubbed edit of a four-year-old post they did­n’t even fin­ish up­dat­ing. Same play­book as the price hike — bury it in ex­ist­ing con­tent, don’t draw at­ten­tion, hope no­body reads closely enough to no­tice.

Somebody al­ways does.

And since we’re here — in a 2024 in­ter­view, Crandell told Fast Company the free tier was “a firm com­mit­ment from the com­pany. Fully fea­tured, free for­ever.”

He’s in an ad­vi­sory role now. “Always free” is­n’t on the page.

I’ve Already Moved On

My Vaultwarden in­stance has been run­ning since January. The Bitwarden cloud ac­count is closed — I shut it down around the time that last post went live. I’m not watch­ing this be­cause I’m wor­ried about my own pass­words. I’m watch­ing it be­cause this is what I doc­u­ment.

The pat­tern is al­ways the same: build trust, es­tab­lish de­pen­dency, then qui­etly rene­go­ti­ate the terms. And it never comes in a sin­gle dra­matic an­nounce­ment. It comes in lay­ers. A fea­ture post with a price change in­side it. A LinkedIn up­date no­body made a press re­lease about. A val­ues page that says some­thing slightly dif­fer­ent than it did last week.

If you’re still on Bitwarden cloud and this is giv­ing you pause — it should. I wrote about the GitHub ver­sion of this story in March — trusted open source plat­form, promises of in­de­pen­dence, years of quiet ero­sion, then Phase 3. The par­al­lel is close enough to make you ner­vous. And if you want to ac­tu­ally own your vault rather than wait and see: here’s how I did it.

My read on where this is go­ing: Sullivan’s en­tire ca­reer is tak­ing com­pa­nies to an exit. Maximize rev­enue, clean up the bal­ance sheet, make the num­bers at­trac­tive, find a buyer — a big tech com­pany, a ri­val like 1Password, some­one who wants the user base or the en­ter­prise con­tracts. That’s what you hire this pro­file of CEO to do. And if that hap­pens, the hard forks won’t be a ques­tion. The price hike got grum­bling. Watching your pass­word man­ager get swal­lowed by a com­pany you switched away from­would kick them off prop­erly.

A Note for Vaultwarden Users

Whether self-host­ing stays vi­able long-term is the real ques­tion worth sit­ting with.

Right now it works be­cause Bitwarden’s clients are open source and the server API is pub­lic. Vaultwarden im­ple­ments that API, and the of­fi­cial apps can’t tell the dif­fer­ence. That de­pends on Bitwarden con­tin­u­ing to pub­lish open source clients and not re­strict­ing which servers they’ll talk to — nei­ther of which is guar­an­teed un­der new man­age­ment.

The brake on the worst case: self-host­ing is a listed Enterprise fea­ture that gen­er­ates real rev­enue. Killing it up­sets pay­ing busi­ness cus­tomers. That mat­ters.

The catch: what Bitwarden sells to en­ter­prises is their own of­fi­cial server stack, not Vaultwarden. Vaultwarden ex­ists in a space they’ve tol­er­ated but never en­dorsed. If the cal­cu­lus shifts, the tol­er­ance ends with­out any an­nounce­ment. Just let the API drift un­til com­pat­i­bil­ity breaks on its own.

I don’t think that’s im­mi­nent. But I also thought the free tier com­mit­ment was iron­clad, and “Always free” is­n’t on the page any­more.

The real safety net is that Bitwarden’s clients are Apache 2.0 li­censed. A fork would need a re­brand to stay clear of the trade­mark — dif­fer­ent name, tweaked UI, same en­gine — but that’s a speed bump, not a wall. The web vault works through any browser re­gard­less of what hap­pens to the apps, so worst case you’d lose aut­ofill tem­porar­ily while a fork caught up. Inconvenient, not cat­a­strophic. Vaultwarden it­self is al­ready proof the model works.

Watch the clients. If they go closed, the com­mu­nity will no­tice fast, and the fork will fol­low.