"I’ve been building open source software technology for NGOs for over a decade, and I have a confession: we’ve been living a lie. For years, I firmly believed that open source was the moral imperative that would democratize technology for the Global South. I championed platforms that could be freely downloaded, customized, and deployed by anyone. I evangelized the virtues of collaborative development and shared knowledge. Today, as I watch our sector implode under the weight of USAID’s near-total elimination, I realize we’ve built a movement that’s structurally impossible to sustain. Our open source revolution in global development just hit the brick wall of economic reality. Our obsession with open-everything has created organizations that are fundamentally incompatible with financial sustainability. We’ve spent decades perfecting the art of giving away our intellectual property while simultaneously begging donors for the money to keep the lights on. The recent cuts of US foreign aid dollars are a reckoning for an entire sector that chose ideological purity over business sense." (Introduction)