We All Depend on Open Source. We Will Defend It Together
akrites.orgWe All Depend on Open Source. We Will Defend It TogetherAn open letter from the technology industry, and the launch of Akrites - a coordinated effort to remediate vulnerabilities in the open source software the world runs on.✦ Read ad free and get the full MichaelFilter · $5.50Part of the MichaelFilter
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Unlock the full reading · $5.50 →A coalition of major tech and finance companies (AWS, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, JPMorgan, etc.) announced Akrites, a coordinated effort to find, fix, and confidentially disclose vulnerabilities in critical open source software. The initiative responds to AI collapsing the attacker/defender equilibrium, where vulnerability discovery now takes minutes instead of weeks, overwhelming maintainer capacity. Akrites centralizes incident response, commits engineering and funding resources, and even pledges to serve as 'maintainer of last resort' for unmaintained critical packages.
Teaching:
• Frame Ashtanga's lineage as open source: a shared codebase of postures and breath maintained by practitioners, vulnerable when overloaded by uncoordinated demands.
• Use this as a class theme on shared responsibility: students aren't just consumers of practice, they're maintainers of the form they inherit.
• Cue the difference between patching (fixing a symptom) and upstream work (addressing the source) when students try to bandaid an injury rather than examine the movement pattern.
• Discuss with coaching clients how AI-accelerated noise mirrors the noise of constant content and self-tracking that buries genuine signal in their practice.
Writing seeds:
• Essay: 'Patch the Commons' — Ashtanga as open source software, teachers as maintainers, and what it means when the form is everyone's and no one's.
• Post for ashtanga.tech: the maintainer-of-last-resort problem in yoga lineages, and why functional Ashtanga steps in when transmission breaks down.
• Shala Daily entry: confidentiality and coordination in adjustments — why teachers don't broadcast every flaw they see in a student's practice.
• Essay on AI's collapse of the attacker/defender equilibrium as a metaphor for how algorithmic culture outpaces somatic literacy.
Idea map:
• Reinforces practice as method: maintenance work is the practice, not the spectacle of release notes.
• Connects to systems literacy — recognizing that personal practice runs on shared dependencies (lineage, language, anatomy assumptions) we rarely audit.
• Embodiment angle: the body is critical infrastructure with latent defects, and attention is the upstream patch.
• Aligns with his throughline that coordination beats heroics — one trusted protocol over a hundred uncoordinated interventions.
Source: https://akrites.org/letter/
Teaching:
• Frame Ashtanga's lineage as open source: a shared codebase of postures and breath maintained by practitioners, vulnerable when overloaded by uncoordinated demands.
• Use this as a class theme on shared responsibility: students aren't just consumers of practice, they're maintainers of the form they inherit.
• Cue the difference between patching (fixing a symptom) and upstream work (addressing the source) when students try to bandaid an injury rather than examine the movement pattern.
• Discuss with coaching clients how AI-accelerated noise mirrors the noise of constant content and self-tracking that buries genuine signal in their practice.
Writing seeds:
• Essay: 'Patch the Commons' — Ashtanga as open source software, teachers as maintainers, and what it means when the form is everyone's and no one's.
• Post for ashtanga.tech: the maintainer-of-last-resort problem in yoga lineages, and why functional Ashtanga steps in when transmission breaks down.
• Shala Daily entry: confidentiality and coordination in adjustments — why teachers don't broadcast every flaw they see in a student's practice.
• Essay on AI's collapse of the attacker/defender equilibrium as a metaphor for how algorithmic culture outpaces somatic literacy.
Idea map:
• Reinforces practice as method: maintenance work is the practice, not the spectacle of release notes.
• Connects to systems literacy — recognizing that personal practice runs on shared dependencies (lineage, language, anatomy assumptions) we rarely audit.
• Embodiment angle: the body is critical infrastructure with latent defects, and attention is the upstream patch.
• Aligns with his throughline that coordination beats heroics — one trusted protocol over a hundred uncoordinated interventions.
Source: https://akrites.org/letter/
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