Three definitions of open source

Open Source as Legal Innovation: the creation of licenses that enabled source code to be open, including copy left which forced contribution of changes.1

Open Source as Collaboration Method: the process of working out in the open with a distributed group of contributors jointly making changes to a central code base.2

Open Source as Ethos: a belief that code should be open for inspection and free as in freedom. That code that runs applications should be available and changeable. That many eyes make all bugs shallow.

  1. See Open Source Licensing ↩

  2. See Commons Based Peer Production ↩

Notes mentioning this note

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