Power Rangers Stack Hands, OpenAI Is the Tinky Winky Impostor

Level 1: The Kid Who Didn't Bring Anything to the Potluck

Imagine five friends throw a potluck dinner where everyone shares the food they made — and a sixth guest shows up with the word "SHARING" printed on his shirt, eats from every dish, and brings a locked lunchbox he won't open for anyone. The picture is the moment the five friends slowly turn around and stare at him while he grins like nothing's wrong. That's the joke: five teams who truly share their work, and one purple impostor who only shares the word.

Level 2: What "Open" Actually Buys You

The projects in the hand stack are worth knowing individually, because juniors meet most of them within their first couple of years. OpenGL is the long-standing cross-platform graphics API — the standardized way programs talk to GPUs to draw 3D scenes. OpenCV is the go-to computer-vision library; if a tutorial detects faces in a webcam feed, it almost certainly starts with import cv2. OpenSSH is the tool behind the ssh command you use to reach every server you'll ever administer. OpenCL lets you run general-purpose computation on GPUs across vendors. OpenVPN builds encrypted tunnels between networks.

"Open source" means the source code is published under a license that legally guarantees you can read, modify, and redistribute it. An "open standard" (OpenGL, OpenCL) is slightly different — it's a published specification anyone may implement, even if specific implementations are proprietary. Both create an ecosystem where you're never locked out: if the maintainer disappears or turns hostile, the community forks and continues.

OpenAI offers neither. You access its models only through a paid API; the weights — the billions of learned numbers that are the model — stay on its servers. You can't inspect them, fine-tune them locally, or run them after the company changes its terms. That's a normal way to run a business, but it's the opposite of what every other logo in the comic means by "open," and that mismatch is the entire punchline.

Level 3: One of These Prefixes Is Lying

The comic (signed mikeorganisciak.com) runs the classic Power Rangers hand-stack template: six small panels of gloved hands joining a team huddle, each tagged with a logo — OpenGL, OpenCV, OpenSSH, OpenCL, OpenVPN — until the sixth hand entering the stack is unmistakably a purple Teletubby arm labeled OpenAI. The big reveal panel shows the Rangers turned around, glaring, while Tinky Winky beams under the OpenAI logo, utterly unbothered.

The taxonomy here is precise, and that's what makes it sting. Every other "Open" in the stack earns the prefix in a verifiable way: OpenGL is an open specification governed by Khronos; OpenCV is BSD/Apache-licensed source you can fork tonight; OpenSSH is maintained by the OpenBSD project under one of the most permissive licenses in existence; OpenCL is another Khronos open standard; OpenVPN ships GPL code. Different flavors of openness — open spec versus open source versus open governance — but all of them are auditable, forkable, or implementable by anyone. OpenAI, meanwhile, was founded as a nonprofit explicitly promising openly shared research, then progressively closed: weights unpublished, architectures undisclosed (the GPT-4 technical report famously declined to state even the parameter count "given the competitive landscape"), capped-profit structure, exclusive cloud partnership. The name became a fossil of an abandoned mission statement.

This is the phenomenon critics call open-washing — borrowing the credibility of the open-source movement as branding while contributing none of the reciprocal obligations. It matters beyond aesthetics: the open projects in this comic are load-bearing civilization infrastructure maintained substantially by volunteers and nonprofit foundations, and they generate enormous value precisely because anyone can inspect and build on them. When a closed company free-rides on that semantic goodwill, it muddies what "open" signals — which is why the community's irritation looks exactly like five Rangers staring down a grinning Teletubby. The deeper irony: the genuinely open challengers to OpenAI's models tend not to put "open" in their names, while the company that does fights FOIA-style scrutiny of its governance. Naming, as ever, is one of the two hard problems — the third being honesty in naming.