Why Open Source?

When we started building GAIA, one question kept coming up: why make it open source? The answer became clearer the more we thought about what kind of product and community we want to build.

1. Privacy and Trust

An AI assistant that integrates deeply with a user’s digital life has to take privacy seriously. People won’t trust something that has access to their emails, files, and schedules unless they can see how it actually works.

Open source creates transparency. Anyone can look at the code, verify how data is handled, and confirm that nothing questionable happens behind the scenes. Privacy isn’t about just having good policies, it’s about giving people confidence through visibility.

2. The Open Source Culture

Through GSoC, we got to experience the open source ecosystem up close. It was inspiring to see developers all over the world contributing simply because they wanted to help. People fix issues, improve documentation, and build new features because they care about the project and the problem it solves.

That kind of collaboration is powerful. It turns a project into a community. And for GAIA, that’s something we really value. Open sourcing it invites more people to contribute ideas, catch bugs, and improve the product for everyone.

3. What It Means for Users

Open source doesn’t just benefit us-it benefits users too. Some people prefer to self-host for more control or privacy, and that’s completely valid. GAIA being open source gives them that option.

At the same time, not everyone wants to deal with setting up cloud environments, managing OAuth, or running LLMs locally. Hosting large models through Ollama or paid APIs like ChatGPT requires both hardware and configuration that most users don’t have.

For them, our hosted version offers the same transparency with none of the technical burden. They get a secure, privacy-focused AI assistant that just works-while still knowing they can inspect or modify the code whenever they want.

In the End

Open source aligns with what we believe technology should be: transparent, community-driven, and user-first. It builds trust, invites collaboration, and gives users real choice. That’s the kind of foundation we want GAIA to stand on.