Elon Musk promises to open source all of X, ‘no exceptions,’ once the security team is done poking at it. The missing detail: what ‘open’ actually means in Musk‑speak.
Elon Musk, the once and future king of Xitter, has announced that the software driving the anti-social site is going open source. In Trump-like fashion, he made the announcement not through some kind of official X channels, like a press release, but through a tweet, or whatever you call a post on X these days (xweet?):
Once we have completed our review for security vulnerabilities, we will make the entire codebase of 𝕏 open source, with no exceptions.
Moreover, we will invite third party reviewers to examine the system that is running to confirm that the open source code is what is running.…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 15, 2026
The part that you see after you press “show more” reads, “Trust through total transparency is the only thing that should be believed.” That certainly sounds like something true FLOSS or Free Software believers would say, except they would probably word it in a way that makes sense. In this case, I’m taking into consideration that the source is somebody who learned to tweet from reading the Orange Oracle (not Larry Ellison).
There’s nothing here to indicate what license Musk’s considering. I figure it’ll be something permissive, because that’s the way billionaire’s roll. It also wouldn’t surprise me if it actually wasn’t open source at all, instead of something resembling one of those fauxpen “source available” licenses.
Of course, the AGPL would be perfect. Time will tell.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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