Open source software is a program which source code is free on the internet. This means that anyone can download the source code and make modifications to it. The whole purpose to this is that the software gets constant upgrades made by the whole community. This is great because everyone con contribute with their knowledge to the software development, making it faster and with important features for the real users. In short these are the advantages of working with souce code:
- Security
- Affordability
- Transparency
- Perpetuity
- Interoperability
- Flexibility
- Localization
All this of course, comes with a condition, everything that comes from an open source code must be also free and open. There are multiple licences that follows the open source pilosophy, some examples are:
Apache License,
BSD license,
GNU General Public License,
GNU Lesser General Public License,
MIT License,
Eclipse Public License and
Mozilla Public License.
flickr photo by miss_curse_10 https://flickr.com/photos/miz_curse_10/1404420256 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license
I think that open source is great because it allows everyone to add whatever they thing is missing or o fix whatever they thing is broken. This is excellent for the companies because they don´t need to hire experts on the customer's behavior to study their needs, an open source code is customer oriented by nature. Also, bug fixing is a lot quicker and cheap because other people do it for free instead of paid engineers of the company. In an open source software everyone is a tester and everyone can be a developer.
sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
https://opensource.org/
