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Open Source Software

Open source software generally denotes that the source code of computer software is open source as to study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code under an open source license. A group of individuals presented "open source" to relabel free software as open-source software, for such software to become more accepted into the corporate world. Software developers may want to publish their software with an open-source software license, so that anybody may also develop the same software or understand how it works. Open-source software generally allows anybody to make a new version of the software, port it to new operating systems and processor architectures, share it with others or market it. The advantage of open source is to let the product be more understandable, modifiable, duplicatable, or simply accessible, while it is still very marketable.


The Open Source Definition, notably, presents an open-source philosophy, and further defines a boundary on the usage, modification and redistribution of open-source software. Software licenses grant rights to users which would otherwise be prohibited by copyright. These include rights on usage, modification and redistribution. Several open-source software licenses have qualified within the boundary of the Open Source Definition. The most prominent example is the popular GNU General Public License (GPL). While open source presents a way to broadly make the sources of a product publicly accessible, the open-source licenses allow the authors to fine tune such access.

Open source vs. closed source

The open source vs. closed source (alternatively called proprietary development) debate is sometimes heated. Making money through traditional methods, such as sale of the use of individual copies and patent royalty payment, is more difficult and sometimes impractical with open-source software. Some closed-source advocates see open source software as damaging to the market of commercial software. This complaint is countered by a large number of alternative funding streams such as:

  • giving the software for free and instead charge for installation and support (used by many Linux distributions)
  • make the software available as open-source so that people will be more likely to purchase a related product or service you do sell (e.g. Openoffice.org vs StarOffice)
  • cost avoidance / cost sharing: many developers need a product, so it makes sense to share development costs (this is the genesis of the X Window System and the Apache web server)

    Studies about security in open-source software versus closed-source software show that closed-source software have fewer advisories but open-source software usually has less time between flaw discovery and a patch or fix. Advocates of closed source argue that since no one is responsible for open-source software, there is no way to know whether it has been fixed. Open-source advocates argue that since the source code of closed-source software is not available, there is no way to know what bugs may exist.

    Open source vs. free software

    The definition of open source software was written to be almost identical to the free software definition. There are very few cases of software that is free software but is not open source software, and vice versa.

    The difference in the terms is where they place the emphasis. Free software is defined in terms of giving the user freedom. This reflects the goal of the free software movement. Open source highlights that the source code is viewable to all and proponents of the term usually emphasize the quality of the software and how this is caused by the development models which are possible and popular among free software/open source software projects.


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