What is Open Source?

Over time you might have heard the word Open Source a lot. And many people might not know the significance of it in this post, you'll see what it is and how it is important

Defining Open source

In general, term When the Code or Source Code of any technology or software is made public for everyone to study it, modify it and distribute it with others.

Why open source?

Now the natural question would be: Why would people want to make their software's code public? Here, Open source is a non-profit movement where everything works on license agreements

From the beginning, the purpose of open source was to give free alternatives to paid technologies and create a collaborative environment within the tech community.

How it works

Let's see an example, A developer from Mumbai came up with idea of a software and she developed an initial version of what she thought and made it open source.

Now a developer from Moscow finds this source code and he creates a copy of that source code and codes a feature, sends it for approval of core developer and after checking this the feature is added to main software.

One developer develops technology or software and makes it open source, now any developer can

Here in open-sourcing, the technology is given a license. When agreeing with a license a person cannot copyright or patent the code or hide any section of it, everything is in public to be modified or used

this process of making a copy of code and adding a feature than adding that to the main software is called Contribution.

There could be hundreds of contributors to a project where the core developer or team of core developers check the code and adds that to the main software or technology.

Not all about free software

This is a misconception that if a software is open source it is free, which isn't true.

Developers are free to sell their software but the condition it that they can't copyright, patent, or hide any part of the code.

Opportunities for students

For any student, doing open source projects can be the way to get work experience while in college or school.

While doing these projects you'll be interacting with professional developers from all over the world. Also, there are programs like GSoc which gives you a stipend for doing contributions to projects.

Some big open source projects

• Android
• VLC
• Linux
• Firefox
• Gimp
• Blender

This was just a basic introduction to what a person should know about whole open source community

In general, Open Source Softwares are very reliable as they are pretty much stable but the updates to these come late as the contributors are working on these in free time.

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