Imagine designing a super-fun game which you can play because you possess the secret rules to it, a.k.a. the code. Now, what if you were to tell your friends these “rules,” and they could start adding cool new aspects to the game?
In a nutshell, that’s what “open source” means. Basically, it means sharing the rules (or code) of a project with everyone, allowing others to see, learn, and maybe even add new features to it. One of the most widely-known open-source projects online is Wikipedia, as its underlying software, MediaWiki, is open-source and content is freely licensed. So, anyone can copy, modify, and redistribute Wikipedia’s content, as it’s built on volunteer-driven, collaborative efforts.
Those who champion open-source software believe in the credence that software should be a community resource. They believe that open-source projects should be open to developers from around the world, who can collaborate on them, make improvements, and add features that would be beneficial to everyone. Since the combined efforts of several developers often outpaces those of a single company, this collaborative design of a model also allows for rapid innovation.
However, open-source doesn’t translate to being “free” – and while many such projects are available for free, developers could also charge for their software. The only stipulation is that the source code should be available to everyone, allowing them to use, modify, and distribute the software as they wish. This article delves into the world of open-source software, and everything that it entails.
What Is Open-Source Software? A History
As mentioned earlier, open-source software projects make their source code available to users to use, modify, improve, and even redistribute, with the usage rights governed by the license that the author grants to anyone who uses the software. The idea is for open-source software programmers to work together to further its growth, as it encourages collaboration and transparency amongst community members.
This is in contrast to closed-source, proprietary software, which usually requires a paid license and cannot be modified or redistributed by anyone except the one who owns the rights to the software. Today, open-source components account often comprise nearly 80% or more of the code base of new applications, with the cost efficiency of using it having proven to be irresistible.
The idea of making source code available freely stemmed from an ideological movement that was the brainwave of MIT programmer Richard Stallman in 1983. He believed that programmers should be able to access software to modify it as they wished, with the goal of learning from, understanding, and improving it. In fact, he started releasing free code under his own license, the GNU Public License.
This new ideology and approach ultimately led to the formation of the Open-Source Initiative (OSI) in 1998, open-source software’s central governing and informational repository. It provides guidelines and rules for how to interact with and use it, as well as definitions, support, code licensing information, and overall community collaboration to help make its deployment, use, and treatment ethical and understandable.
How Open-Source Software Works
Open-source code is generally stored in a public repository and shared publicly, with anyone having access to the repository being able to use the code independently and contribute improvements to the functionality and design of the overall project. Moreover, open-source software generally has a distribution license, which includes terms defining how developers can study, use, modify, and most importantly, redistribute it.
According to the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, five of the most popular licenses are the MIT License, the Apache License, the GNU General Public License (GPL) 3.0, the more restrictive GNU GPL 2.0 (requiring copies of modified code be made available for public use), and the BSD License 2.0 (3-clause, less restrictive). When the developer changes the source code, the software needs to include what was changed and how.
Depending on its licensing terms, the software that’s a result of these modifications might or might not be required to be made available for free. And, not surprisingly, there are many different flavours of open-source software, with varying degrees of freedom to the licensees.
While there are more than 200 open-source licenses out there, many are redundant, with the OSI only recognising around 80 truly open-source and unique licenses and a vast majority of open-source projects falling under just 8 licenses.
Final Words
Not surprisingly, many beginner developers, when they first enter the open-source world, are often hesitant about engaging in discussions in a public space and ‘opening up’ their code. Of course, this hesitation is valid, with concerns about their opinions and code reflecting poorly on their careers and coding skills.
However, the point is to gather invaluable experiences and collaborate with developers from all over the world, rather striving for perfection. After all, everyone has made and continues to make mistakes.
What started as a community-driven initiative has now transformed into an industry-standard approach to developing software. After all, the open-source ecosystem offers a gamut of advantages, ranging from cost savings and flexibility to collective intelligence in development. It’s important to understand and implement an open-source policy for risk management, as it’s the foundation for secure and compliant use of open-source components.
In fact, open-source software composition analysis and vulnerability scanning tools are critical in pinpointing and taking care of security risks, allowing enterprises to benefit from open-source software, managing any possible software challenges, and fostering a robust open-source environment for advancing software innovation.
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