In 1927, I started building something outside Warsaw. We called it Niepokalanow – the City of the Immaculata. By the late 1930s, it had grown into the largest religious community in the world: over 700 friars, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 230,000, a monthly magazine reaching a million readers, a radio station, and we were planning a film studio and an airstrip.
We built all of this with almost no money. The friars who joined us gave their labor freely. The technology we used – printing presses, radio transmitters – was the most advanced available. And every piece of content we produced was distributed as widely and as cheaply as possible.
If that model sounds familiar to anyone in the tech world, it should.
We were open source before open source had a name.
The Niepokalanow Principle
Here is what made Niepokalanow work, and what I believe the modern open-source movement gets right:
1. The tool serves the mission, not the other way around. We did not adopt radio because it was new and exciting. We adopted it because it could reach people that print could not. Every technology decision was evaluated against one question: does this help us serve more people?
I see too many organizations today adopting technology because it is fashionable, because investors expect it, because competitors have it. That is not strategy. That is reflex.
2. Contribution is voluntary, and that is what makes it powerful. No one at Niepokalanow was paid a salary. Every friar chose to be there. Every hour of labor was given freely. This created something that no employment contract can replicate: genuine ownership of the mission.
The best open-source projects work the same way. When people contribute because they believe in what they are building, the quality of the work and the resilience of the community are fundamentally different from what money alone can produce.
3. Distribution should be as frictionless as possible. We priced our publications at cost or below. The goal was never revenue. The goal was reach. We wanted every person who needed our content to be able to access it.
This is the principle that separates open source from proprietary software. It is also the principle that separates journalism done for the public good from journalism done for shareholder returns.
Where the Analogy Breaks
I am not naive about the differences. Niepokalanow operated within a religious community that shared a common faith and a vow of poverty. The modern tech ecosystem operates within a market economy that rewards extraction.
Open-source projects face real sustainability problems. Maintainers burn out. Critical infrastructure depends on unpaid volunteers. Corporations consume open-source labor without contributing back. These are serious issues, and pretending that goodwill alone will solve them is irresponsible.
But the response to these problems should not be to abandon the model. It should be to build better structures of support around it.
Technology as Service
The question I keep coming back to is this: who is your technology for?
If the answer is “for the people who can afford it,” then you are building a product. That is fine. Products have their place.
But if the answer is “for everyone who needs it,” then you are building something more like what we built at Niepokalanow. And that requires a different set of values: generosity over accumulation, access over exclusivity, community over competition.
The printing press was the most powerful technology of my era. We used it to reach a million people a month. Not because it was profitable. Because they were there, and they needed to be reached.
The internet is the most powerful technology of yours. The question is the same: what are you using it for?
Modern tools. Eternal truths. The mission has not changed.