The polvaria works because the woman behind the bar is the owner.

This is important. Not in a sentimental way, not in a “support small business” way, but in the structural way that determines whether the polvo is good or not. She decides the menu. She knows the regulars. She pours the ribeiro the way it should be poured, which is to say generously, into ceramic cups that don’t match, without asking if you’d prefer something else. There is nothing else. This is the polvaria.

Her name is — well, it doesn’t matter. Let’s call her Carme. Carme has been running this place for twenty-two years. Before her, it was her mother. Before that, nobody remembers exactly, but there’s a photograph on the wall from 1971 where you can see the same bar, the same window, and a man with a moustache who might be her grandfather or might be someone else entirely. Nobody’s checked. It doesn’t matter. The point is that the place has been itself for a long time, and the reason it has been itself is that the person making the decisions is the person doing the work.

This is not a metaphor yet. Give me a minute.

I run my own tools. This is not impressive. Plenty of people do. But I want to be specific about what “my own” means, because the phrase is about to become important.

I have a machine. On that machine, there is software. The software talks to AI models — different ones, depending on the task. It coordinates agents that do work: writing, coding, researching, deploying. The architecture is mine. Not because I built every piece from scratch, but because I chose every piece. I decided which model handles what. I decided how the agents communicate. I decided what runs locally and what runs in the cloud. When something breaks, I fix it. When something improves, I improve it. The kitchen is mine.

The software is open source. Anyone can take it, run it, modify it, break it, fix it. It belongs to whoever uses it, in the way that a recipe belongs to whoever cooks it. The author wrote it down, sure, but the polvo on your plate is yours. You made it. You chose the paprika.

Now. Imagine that the company that sells the paprika buys the recipe book.

There’s a man in California — there’s always a man in California — and his company makes AI models. Very good ones. The best, probably, depending on how you measure. His business is selling access to intelligence. Not the intelligence itself, mind you. Access. The difference matters. The intelligence lives on his servers, behind his API, under his terms of service. You can use it, the way you can use electricity. You pay the bill, the lights come on. You stop paying, the lights go off. You don’t own the power station. You don’t even know where it is.

This is fine. I use his models too, sometimes. They’re good. I’m not a purist.

But there’s a difference between buying paprika from someone and having that someone move into your kitchen. And lately, the paprika sellers have been very interested in kitchens.

Let me tell you about my grandfather. Not mine exactly — a grandfather, the kind that exists in every Galician family, the way rain exists in every Galician winter. He had a leira. A small plot of land up in the hills above the river, not much, maybe enough for potatoes, some grelos, a few vines that produced wine so rough it could strip paint. But it was his. His name on the deed, such as deeds existed. His hands in the soil.

One day the cacique came by. The cacique always comes by eventually. He had better seeds. Better tools. A new fertiliser from Germany that would double the yield. He wasn’t buying the land, no. He was offering to help. A partnership. The grandfather would keep working the leira, and the cacique would provide the means to make it productive. Modern. Efficient.

The grandfather said no.

Not because the offer was bad. The seeds probably were better. The fertiliser probably did work. But the grandfather understood something that doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet: once someone else decides what you plant, it’s not your leira anymore. It’s theirs with your name on it. You’re still doing the work, still getting your hands dirty, still waking up at dawn. But the decisions — the ones that matter, the ones about what grows and what doesn’t, what stays and what goes — those are made somewhere else now. In a house with more rooms than people.

The grandfather kept his rough wine and his modest potatoes and died owning exactly what he’d always owned. The families who took the cacique’s deal had better harvests for a few years. Then the terms changed. Then the terms changed again. Then the cacique’s son decided potatoes weren’t profitable and maybe the land would be better used for eucalyptus.

The eucalyptus burns, by the way. Every summer. But that’s another story.

Here’s what happens when a company that sells AI models acquires — or “partners with,” or “integrates,” or “strategically aligns with,” which are all the same word wearing different suits — an open-source tool.

Day one: nothing changes. The code is still open. The community is still there. The blog post announces the partnership with words like “accelerate” and “ecosystem” and “committed to open source.” Everyone applauds. The polvo still tastes the same.

Day thirty: a new feature appears. It works best with the company’s own models. Not exclusively — that would be too obvious. But best. The integration is smoother. The latency is lower. The documentation is more detailed. If you use a different model, it still works, technically. The way a car still works with the wrong tyres. It drives. It just doesn’t drive well.

Day ninety: another feature. This one requires the company’s API for “security reasons” or “performance optimization” or some other phrase that sounds responsible and is impossible to argue against without sounding paranoid. The open-source version still exists, but it’s missing things. Important things. The kind of things that make you say “I’ll just use the integrated version, it’s easier.”

Day three hundred and sixty-five: you look up and realise you’re running their tool, on their infrastructure, under their terms. The code is still technically open. You could still fork it, technically. The way you could still bake your own bread instead of buying it. You could. You won’t. The convenience has become dependency, and the dependency has become invisible, which is the most effective kind.

The woman behind the bar has that look. The one people get when they’re working in a place that used to be theirs.

I want to be fair. Companies are not evil for wanting to grow. The man in California is not a cacique. He’s building something extraordinary, and he probably believes — sincerely, genuinely — that controlling more of the stack will produce better outcomes for everyone. Better polvo. Better ribeiro. A nicer polvaria with matching cups and a menu in three languages.

And maybe he’s right. Maybe the polvo will be better.

But I keep coming back to the kitchen. To Carme, who buys her octopus from the same fisherman in Ribeira every Thursday morning and whose polvo is good not because the recipe is secret but because she’s been making it for twenty-two years and she knows — in her hands, not in her head — exactly when it’s done. That knowledge doesn’t transfer. It doesn’t scale. It doesn’t fit in an API. It lives in the specific relationship between a woman and a copper pot and ten thousand repetitions.

When you own your tools, you develop that relationship. You learn the quirks, the edges, the moments where the documentation is wrong and your instinct is right. You build something that is yours in the way that matters: not legally, not financially, but practically. You know how it works because you made it work. You made the choices. You chose the paprika.

When someone else owns your tools, you develop a different relationship. A relationship with their choices. Their paprika. Their version of what “good” means. And their version might be excellent — probably is excellent — but it’s not yours. And one Tuesday the polvo tastes different and nobody can explain why, because the decision was made in a building with more rooms than people, by someone who has never been to Galicia and doesn’t know what ribeiro is and thinks octopus is something you order at a restaurant in San Francisco for forty-seven dollars.

The thing about open source is that it’s fragile. Not technically — technically it’s robust, it’s everywhere, it runs the world. Fragile in the human sense. It depends on people caring enough to maintain something they don’t own. It depends on companies resisting the urge to enclose what’s open, fence what’s common, monetise what’s free. It depends on the grandfather saying no to the cacique, even when the seeds really are better.

I don’t know if the tools I use will stay open. I don’t know if the kitchen will stay mine. I know that today it is, and that today I can choose my models, my architecture, my agents, my paprika. I know that the moment I stop paying attention, someone will offer me better seeds.

I’ll keep my rough wine, I think. It’s not efficient. It’s not optimised. The yield is modest and the cups don’t match and the chalkboard menu hasn’t changed since 2011.

But the polvo is good. And it’s mine. And I know exactly why it tastes like that.

Enfin.