About Our Founder
John David Marx. Same sand, bigger ideas.
The Foundation is not about its founder. It is about the institution and the people it invites in. But people ask who started it, so here he is, in the sandbox where the work gets done.
Build · Explore · Play · Repeat
Why he started the Foundation.
Two things make Webspinner’s work not only possible, but promising. The open-source community has already bestowed on all mankind the work of millions of its members. The growing availability of open-weight AI models complements that contribution with minds you can use locally, free of charge.
Webspinner contributes to that community foundation, and seeks to democratize its availability to global citizens, regardless of race, country, religion, or creed. This is the hope AI can bring: through prudent use of available resources, and human ingenuity, augmented and amplified by modern Synthetic Intelligence.
— John David Marx, 6 October 2026
That is the Foundation’s purpose in his words: Synthetic Intelligence that ordinary people own outright rather than rent, taught for free to anyone who wants to learn it.
The sandbox is real.
The machines in the sand are the ones Webspinner’s sovereign SI runs on: a Mac Studio, two EdgeXpert computers, a router and a drive. They live in his office in Portland, Oregon, not in someone else’s cloud, and the Mac Studio is the one that serves this page. The screen behind him shows the Inference Desktop and its promise: Create your AI, and own it.
A life of building things that did not exist yet.
John taught himself to program at sixteen, on a Burroughs B-1900, from manuals and late nights. His first technology job was the night shift at Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. He studied technology and philosophy at TCU, and founded his first company, PC Company, in 1986, before he graduated.
In 1989 he built CGL, a fourth-generation language that generated complete C applications for Unix, and founded The Open Systems Group on it, in his garage. It made the Inc. 500 in 1996, at number 127, and later spun off Para-Docs Software for document and content management.
From 2012 to 2017 he was at Red Hat, rising from consulting to lead business development for financial services, helping global banks adopt OpenShift and put DevOps into production. Since 2020 he has been a Principal at Cognizant, leading enterprise AI-SDLC transformation. In 2024 he came full circle, back to invention, and began building Webspinner.
The next chapter.
I’ve spent 45 years watching technology separate the people who understand it from those who don’t. I’d like to spend the next chapter changing that.
— John David Marx