Forkable

Hi folks, This week’s lead story looks at the European Commission’s landmark tech sovereignty package — and what it means for open source specifically. Elsewhere, Euro-Office is set to launch as a European alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Docs; IBM and Red Hat commit $5 billion to securing the open source supply chain; Supabase raises $500 million at a $10.5 billion valuation; and much more.

Welcome to Forkable’s Open Profile column, where I go in-depth on key projects, companies, and figures from across the open source realm. In this edition, I check in with Karthik Ranganathan, CEO and co-founder of Yugabyte, an open-source database company now pushing into AI infrastructure with the launch of Meko, a new “memory layer” for AI agents. Meko reflects how infrastructure companies are reassessing their role in the agentic AI stack.

Hi folks, This week’s lead story looks at NHS England moving hundreds of public GitHub repositories behind closed doors, amid growing concern that AI systems capable of analysing codebases at scale are changing the security calculus around open source.

Hi folks, This week’s lead story looks at a widely used open-source package being compromised through its own release process, after attackers slipped a malicious update into a trusted distribution channel.

Welcome to Forkable, a weekly newsletter covering the world of open source, curated by London-based technology journalist and ex-TechCrunch writer Paul Sawers. A bit about me: I’ve evolved from writing about consumer tech at The Next Web, through a hybrid consumer and enterprise beat at VentureBeat, and onto TechCrunch where I was Senior Writer focused on European technology startups with a distinctly enterprise flavour. You can see my Techmeme headlines spanning 14 years here.

Hi folks, This week’s lead story looks at Cal.com moving its core codebase behind closed doors, as the company argues that AI-driven vulnerability discovery is making open development harder to defend.

Hi folks, This week’s lead story looks at Project Glasswing, an effort to bring frontier AI security tools into the hands of open-source maintainers (though not exclusively), as models like Anthropic’s Claude Mythos begin to uncover vulnerabilities that have gone undetected for decades.

Hi folks, This week’s lead story looks at the launch of Betterleaks, a new open-source secrets scanner from the creator of Gitleaks, and what it says about how security tooling — and ownership — is evolving in the AI era.

Hi folks, This week’s lead story looks at OpenAI’s move to acquire Astral, the company behind popular open-source Python tools Ruff and uv, as it continues to pull widely used developer tools and viral projects into its orbit. Elsewhere, there’s fresh funding for open-source security, growing corporate interest around OpenClaw, and a lot more. As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me. Paul Thanks for reading Forkable.

Hi folks, This week’s lead story looks at Nvidia’s reported $26 billion push into open-weights AI models, a move that would see the chip giant wade further into the software layer of AI while reinforcing the hardware ecosystem that made it dominant.