This is a guest post by Jenny Florence who is a full-time professional writer. If you would also like to write for us, have a look at this page.
The terms open source and free-soft have been thrown around greatly for the past decade or so, but do many people really understand what they relate to? Words often used to describe the open source scene may include free, non-proprietary or maybe even shareware. However, these phrases still don't really explain what it is. By definition, open source is defined as being able to see the actual source code of the program in question while closed source would mean that the only code available on the users end is in binary format. Now, you're probably thinking to yourself, "Great, now that I know what open source stands for, how exactly does it affect me?"
That is a great
question. It affects almost everything that is done on a personal
computer today. From the freedom to search Google to the very internet
used to get to your favorite webpage, the liberty of open source makes
the world go round.
The Essentials
To be considered
as an open source project there are generally three categories the
software must adhere to. Firstly, the source code should be publicly
available. This ensures that anybody can modify it to their choosing no
matter who they are affiliated with. It must also be easily obtainable
and not be written in a such a way that it may be difficult to decipher.
Secondly, the software must be distributed freely. There is not to be
any difficulty of transfer along the way from any developer who wishes
to modify the software in their own way. Finally, everybody has the
right to derive new works, projects and creations by modifying the
source code in any way they see fit. In a layman's terms the term open
source is explained very broadly - sort of like personal finances - and does not necessarily mean it is free, even though it is associated heavily with free software.
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