the.com/open source
Code so transparent, a thousand strangers can judge your variable names.
means Software whose source code is made publicly available for anyone to view, use, modify, and redistribute, usually under a license that spells out the rules.
from A late-20th-century coinage from software culture — the term was deliberately chosen in 1998 by a group of programmers and advocates (including Christine Peterson, with the label popularized via the Open Source Initiative founded by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens) as a more business-friendly alternative to 'free software,' partly to dodge the ambiguity of 'free' meaning both 'no cost' and 'at liberty.' The words themselves are plain English — 'open' plus 'source' (as in source code, the human-readable instructions behind a program) — but the phrase's specific meaning as a movement and licensing philosophy is a product of that deliberate rebranding.
- origin
- Term coined in 1998 to sound less anti-business than free software
- irony
- Powers most of the internet, maintained by one tired volunteer
- economics
- Billion-dollar companies run on code nobody pays for
- truth
- Free as in speech, not always as in weekend