In this comprehensive editorial note, Amjad Majid reflects on the past four decades of technological evolution, highlighting the rise of Open Source more as a mindset than a movement. The note explores how this mindset fostered the growth of diverse communities whose primary vision centered on sharing, contributing, and disseminating knowledge. Such a perspective gave rise to a counterculture that, directly or indirectly, resisted the monopoly of ideas and epistemes, challenging proprietorship within centralized systems that, by their very nature, tend to control access to knowledge to maintain hierarchy, status, and power. Throughout the note, Majid underscores the relevance of this Open Source mindset, intersecting it with key aspects of the arts and humanities that are central to the concept of “Open Source as an ideology of participation and inclusiveness.” Since 2019, this ideology has been a quintessential driving force behind Inverse Journal and its growth into a platform that has published 145 contributors (from 20 countries and territories) whose work has been read by 471,798 unique readers from 205 countries and territories (as of August 2024).