The word 'open' has been doing a lot of heavy lifting in Silicon Valley. It appears on the doors of companies that won't let you see their code, on the licenses that require 41 pages of legal review before you can use anything, and on the branding of platforms whose entire business model depends on closing off what they claim to open up. OpenFatigue™ is a satirical website that makes this point with the precision of a well-aimed fax machine. The site works because it refuses to stay at the level of vague complaint. Every feature description is a specific, recognizable move from the open-washing playbook: 'source visible' means a quarterly screenshot of code; 'community edition' is maintained by one person on sabbatical; the open door policy requires badge access to a building whose badge reader is closed source. These aren't exaggerations so much as compressions. Anyone who has tried to actually use an 'open' model knows the feeling of downloading weights only to discover the acceptable use policy is longer than the model card. The pricing table is where the comedy gets sharpest. The free tier lets you read the README and star the repo (required). Pro costs $49 per month per seat per token per vibe. Enterprise lets you see the source code in a supervised room, and for an extra fee, the company will stop calling itself open. The footnote — 'Excludes inference, storage, egress, ingress, regress, tokens, the tokens used to count tokens, and vibes' — is the kind of joke that lands because it barely qualifies as a joke. The testimonials section punches in several directions at once. The open-source maintainer whose project got forked into a closed product called OpenMyProject. The founder who renamed ClosedCorp to OpenCorp, changed nothing else, and closed a Series B in 48 hours. The anonymous person who reads the OSI definition every night like scripture. Each one captures a real constituency of frustration — maintainers, users, and standards advocates — without collapsing them into the same grievance. What elevates this beyond a Twitter thread is the structural commitment. The Open Name Generator, the Openness Meter, the Is It Open? classifier (closed-source, naturally) — these aren't just gags, they're functional parodies of the exact product-page components that real open-washing companies deploy. The form IS the joke. You scroll the way you'd scroll a real SaaS landing page, and the friction between the familiar format and the absurd content is where most of the comedy lives. The closing move is the sharpest: a 'Symptoms' section that reads like a diagnostic checklist for anyone who has spent time in open-source communities. 'You flinch when a press release says open.' 'You say open weights with air quotes, out loud, unprompted.' And then, without breaking character, the piece links to the actual OSI Open Source Definition and the Open Source AI Definition. The satire has a thesis, and it earns it. OpenFatigue™ is a single-page website doing the work of a 3,000-word essay. It won't change corporate behavior, but it crystallizes a real and specific frustration — that the word 'open' has been diluted to the point of semantic collapse — into something you can send to a colleague with no additional context required.
