What is Open Source
Free Software Movement
The free software movement was created to address the problem of the tech industry moving towards only creating proprietary software.
Open Source Origins
The open source movement has its origins in the free software movement of the 1980s.
Contributing to Open Source
It is now possible to contribute to millions of open source repositories on sites like GitHub, which provides tools to help maintain open source projects.
Open Source: Industry Tools
Many of the standard tools of the software industry are open source projects.
Open Source: Project Longevity
One benefit of open source projects is their longevity.
This is because the community can continue developing a project even if it is abandoned by its original maintainers, unlike proprietary software.
Open Source: Stability & Quality
One benefit of standard open source projects is that their code is often stable and high quality.
Because popular open source projects are so widely adopted, many people all over the world can contribute ideas, improvements, and fixes to these projects.
What is Open Source?
Open source software is software whose code is free to view, modify, and distribute.
To truly be “open source” software must have all three of those components.
Open Source: Improving Communication
One benefit of open source projects is that they help developers improve their coding and communication skills by collaborating with other developers from all over the world.
Proprietary Software
Proprietary software is software whose code is only visible to a select few (e.g. people who work at the company that create the software).
