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Open Source CodingOpen source refers to a program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and modification from its actual design free of charge. Open source code is typically created as a joint effort in which programmers improve upon the code and share the changes within that community. Open source developed in the technological community as a response to proprietary software owned by corporations like Microsoft.In other words, open Source is a software distribution that allows the user access to the program's source code, to view the source code, modify it, and redistribute it to others. Contrast this with the more traditional closed source software circulation that has dominated the retail software market for decades, whereby the user only gets the executable version of the program, not the raw source code itself. Two most well known open source projects are the Linux OS and the Apache Web server. For either of these, we can get the full source code to compile or change to run on our systems. Contrast this with the Windows OS or the IIS Web server, for which we can't see or modify the source code and in fact in early 2004 when some older Windows source code was leaked, Microsoft immediately made a major effort to locate the leak's origin and put a stop to the widespread source distribution. A major tenant of a closed source system such as Windows is that the owner (in this case Microsoft) keeps very tight control over who is allowed to even see the source, seeing the source as valuable property that if leaked and shared reduced its commercial value. | |