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What is open source, and why is it important? Open source is a type of licensing agreement that allows users to freely modify a work, use said work in new ways, integrate the work into a larger project or derive a new work based on the original. By removing barriers between innovators, open source promotes a free exchange of ideas within a community to drive creative, scientific and technological advancement.

Although, it is most commonly used in the software industry, professionals utilize open source licenses in many industries: biotech, electronics, fashion, robotics and teaching to name a few. This article will focus exclusively on the software applications.

By placing an open source license on an original work, a person or organization agrees to:

Make the entirety of the program's code available to the public Allow anyone to modify, enhance or re-engineer a program's code Allow the creation of derivative works Allow the program to be utilized for any purpose the user wishes (1) An open source licensing agreement stands in contrast to "proprietary licensing." When a user first starts a piece of proprietary software (e.g. Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, iTunes) the user typically agrees that they will not alter or modify the source code and will only use the software in the ways prescribed by the manufacturer. The back-end code of proprietary software is kept secret from the public, and anyone attempting to re-engineer or copy the code is subject to legal action by the software's owner.

Why open source? The idea of open source stems from the technology community. From the earliest days of computers, programmers and engineers developed new technologies through collaboration. For instance, a programmer in San Jose develops a new application, then another programmer in Singapore studies the application and discovers ways to improve it. The knowledge is shared, and the entire community benefits from the collective innovation.

In many ways, the creation of the open source license was a direct response to proprietary manufacturing. The not-for-profit Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded in 1998. It administers open source licensing around the world, promotes open source development, facilitates community and educational initiatives, and gives conferences (2).

The open source cycle Many people believe that creating an open source product means giving that product away for free. While many open source applications are free, developers are entitled to sell their work to the public. However, the license dictates that they are not allowed to copyright or patent the derivative work, or keep any part of its code secret. Therefore, others may create derivative works that perform the same function better, for nothing.

The open source license naturally propagates to all applications that derive from the original. By agreeing to the license, users are also bound to it. Once a piece of software is made open source, all versions of the software will be open source in perpetuity.

Instead of selling open source products directly, businesses tend to build services on top of an open source foundation. A stronger base improves all businesses that depend on the software.

The Internet is open source The fundamental functions of the Internet are built on open source technologies. The Linux operating system regulates the operation of Web servers, and the Apache Web server application negotiates data transfer between the worldwide server infrastructure and personal devices. Countless Internet applications are also open source.

Large Internet companies, like Facebook and Google, have even opened up some of their proprietary innovations to the open source community. Disseminating the technology improves the experience for all users by creating efficiencies and making the entire Internet more streamlined.

Open source licensing encourages innovation through collaboration. Without it, many of the technologies we take for granted today would never have developed, or would be locked away behind patent law. The open source movement is the reason that technology has developed at such a breakneck pace for the past few decades.

Open source is awesome, and there are many reasons why you might consider consuming, publishing, collaborating on, or supporting open source.1 Here are a few of them:

Microeconomic motivations Open source is in your best interest, whether you're an individual, a corporation, a small business, a non-profit, or a government agency.

Shift developers from low-value work to high-value work. We like to say in open source that all the easy problems have already been solved. Blogging, content management, and operating systems are all problems with established (and mainstream) open source solutions, to name a few. While your developers could spend their time reinventing wheels that the open source community have already perfected, it's far preferable to use the worlds best wheel, especially when that wheel comes at no cost to you. This frees developers up to work on yet-unsolved challenges, the types of challenges that are unique to and add value to your organization's mission. Why not stand on the shoulders of technology giants?

Lower total cost of ownership (TCO): Using open source software yields a lower total cost of ownership when compared to closed source and proprietary alternatives. Adopting open source software generally has a lower up-front cost (because the software often comes at no cost or relatively low cost), and shifts the cost center from licensing (an operating expense) to customization and implementation (a capital expense). Additional costs like training, maintenance, and support are sunk costs. You're going to be paying for both regardless of if the software is open or closed source, the cost often being baked into the license in the case of commercial, off-the-shelf software (COTS). What makes open source unique is that you're not paying for the right to use the underlying intellectual property.

Cost Open source Proprietary Licensing No Yes Implementation Yes Yes Maintenance Yes Yes Support Yes Yes Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow (Linus's Law): Empirically, open source tends to produce better quality software than its proprietary or alternative counterparts. When you write closed source software, the only developers that can potentially detect, diagnose, triage, and resolve software bugs are those that happen to be employed by the company that publishes the software (or more likely, the arms-length contractor they pay to build it). Open source provides three advantages: first, you have the opportunity to tap the knowledge of the world's best developers, not just those on one organization's payroll. Second, the number of potentially contributing developers and thus the potential knowledge pool is orders of magnitude larger. Finally, open source software gets adapted to a variety of use cases, not just the one the publisher originally intended, surfacing bugs and edge cases much more rapidly than traditional, predictive QA processes.

Modern software development practices: Open source software is more than simply "published" code. You'd be hard-pressed to find an open source project that follows outdated, waterfall, or rigid command-and-control development philosophies, still common in many large, bureaucratic organizations. By virtue of being distributed and unbridled by policy or technical debt, open source projects all but necessitate modern software development workflows. These workflows are electronic (meaning process is naturally captured and exposed), asynchronous (meaning decisions are time and location agnostic), and lock-free (meaning contributors can rapidly experiment without prior approval). These three workflow characteristics means more rapid development cycles and more frequent releases without sacrificing quality.

Open source is the future: You'd be hard pressed to find a startup today worth it's venture capital funding not based, at least in part (if not largely) on open source. Open source isn't a fad, or a bunch of hippies out in California passing around tie-dye laptops like they would illicit substances. Open source is how modern organizations, and increasingly more traditional organizations build software. It's becoming exceedingly challenging to make the argument that five-or-ten years from now the technology landscape is going to be less collaborative and more closed. Heck, even Microsoft, traditionally one of the most stark opponents to open source, has open sourced their primary development framework (along with Apple and Swift). Today, all of the largest names in technology, from IBM, to SAP, to Adobe actively participate in the open source community. It's slightly inaccurate to say that "open source is the future." Open source has already won.

Patch on your own schedule: So long as software is written by humans, bugs and security vulnerabilities are inevitable. When a vulnerability is discovered in a proprietary software project, you have to wait for the workday to begin in the company's timezone, for meetings to be held, tasks deligated, and code written, all before G&A teams like legal, sales, and marketing have to coordinate how to get the fix into the next regularly-scheduled release. For proprietary software, bugs and vulnerabilities affect the bottom line, and thus there's a disincentive to make their details widely publicized. With open source, not only can leaner, more agile, non-profit-oriented organization move faster, since you have access to the source code, you can often apply fixes, both large and small, at your own convenience, not at the convenience of the publishing organization's release cycle.

Upstream improvements: If you consume open source software, it's in your best interest to contribute back. Contributions can be in the form of reporting bugs, or even submitting proposed fixes. Since software is written by humans, it's highly unlikely to be perfect, and even if so, likely doesn't satisfy every use case. Rather than forking the project and implementing changes into your own version (closed source), submitting bug reports and improvements upstream (open source) allows you to more easily continue to benefit from the subsequent fixes and improvements submitted by others.

GitHub Cofounder Tom Preston-Werner lays out some additional arguments in his post Open Source (Almost) Everything: Force multiplier: Open source is a force multiplier for your developers. This happens in three ways: First, when communities form around shared challenges, the diversity of ideas that naturally emerges surfaces better solutions than if the marketplace of ideas was limited to just your organization, meaning developers are working smarter. Second, exposing the problem space to other interested organizations provides additional human capital to tackle your challenge, meaning the solution has more developer hours thrown at it, at no additional cost to you. Finally, "more users means more use cases being explored, which means more robust code."

Modular: Open source projects tend to be more modularly architected, improving both the flexibility, and the robustness of the code. When you're building software for a single use case, you're able to take some technical short cuts. The problem comes when you'd like to use that software in a different use case, or when your requirements change. Open source, by its nature, is built for a variety of use cases, environments, and users. This means more options (rather than hard coding defaults for a particular use), and a tendency to encourage more modularity (rather than assuing a one-size-fits-all featureset), resulting in greater flexibility and lower customization costs in the long run. Put another way, open source necessitates cleaner, more maintainable code. "Even internal code should pretend to be open source code".

Reduce duplication of effort: You should focus on your core competency. What makes you unique or gives you an advantage? Everything else is the work everyone else is also doing: or put another way, the work you need to do so that you can do the work that you want to do. It doesn't have to be that way. Open source reduces duplication of efforts, both within an organization and across organizations, by allowing for individual components to be shared. Coca-Cola's secret sauce is the formula for its syrup, not its ability publish blog posts or post press releases. Using an open source CMS, or sharing their built-in-house blog components with the world, doesn't make Pepsi taste any better. "Less duplication means more work towards things that matter."

Great advertising: Maintainers of successful open source projects are often seen as industry leaders, providing themselves with the ability to shape the conversation around a particular software problem and associating their brand with the preferred solution. 37Signals is known for creating Ruby on Rails. GitHub is known for creating Hubot. ("Within two days it had 500 watchers on GitHub and 409 upvotes on Hacker News. This translates into goodwill for GitHub and more superfans than ever before").

Attract talent: Developers want to work on yet-unsolved problems. Open source allows you to showcase to the developer community, the interesting challenges you face, and how you think about solving them. Open source developers can casually contribute to projects, to learn how you work, and what it's like developing software for a particular set of challenges. If they like what they see, there's a much better chance that they'll apply for a job, than if your organization was a black box when it comes to what it's like to work there. "Smart developers like to hang out with smart code."

Best technical interview possible: Technical interviews traditionally involve working on a simulated problem that can be tackled in a set amount of time with little additional context. Such simulations, by definition, aren't real world use cases, nor do they show what working with an applicant would be like. Open source provides visibility into both how a candidate solves problems, and how they work with others. You can hire much more confidently if, for the past six months, the candidate has been contributing to the project you want them work on, and you like their work. "[T]he best technical interview possible is the one you don't have to do because the candidate is already kicking ass on one of your open source projects."

Macroeconomic motivations By combining and augmenting parallel or related efforts, open source makes a society more efficient at producing higher quality software.

Efficiency: Many of the microeconomic arguments above, in the aggregate, have a macroeconomic impact. When firms work more efficiently, the economy produces more (and better) software, software that can in turn, improve lives. If you believe that all the easy problems have already been solved, then on a macroeconomic level, open source allows you to move firms from lower-level work to higher level, yet-unsolved challenges. The results of this higher level work tends to be disruptive, rather than iterative, creating the churn that invigorates the economy. If every technology company must devote a few years of R&D solving the same 5-10 problems, that delays (or at the very least shifts capital from) the company's ability to be productive and produce technology that's valuable to society, not to mention, it raises the barrier for new market entrants to offer alternatives to established firms.

Stand on the shoulders of giants: Today, innovative technology, the type of technology that improves quality of life, isn't created in a vacuum. Even closed source technology, from the cell phone in your pocket to the car you drive to the Fortune 500 company that produced them, rely heavily on open source (Don't believe me? Take a look at your phone's "settings -> about" page). Just as algebra and trigonometry being unencumbered by private sector copyright gave way to everything from calculus to quantum physics, open source allows developers to take already-solved problems as a given, to rely on the knowledge of experts beyond their own domain of expertise, and unlocks their potential to create new inventions, otherwise not possible.

Fuel the marketplace of ideas: Software is nothing more than technical knowledge. There was once a time when alchemists would withhold the results of their work, claiming their discoveries as proprietary. Each had to learn the hard way the result on the human body of drinking lead. When those alchemists began sharing their work, we began calling them scientists, and the scientific revolution was born. The same is true of mathematics, literature, and computer software. Two developers working individually may come up with two solutions to a given problem, but through dialog and collaboration, each bringing their own knowledge and experience, may discover three, five, or ten solutions to the same, and society is better as a result.

Moral motivations The formal name for open source is free/libre open source software. As such, open source motivations have a strong moral component.

Free as in speech, not as in beer: Open source software is not without cost. When open source software is called "free," it is a reference to the rights the software consumers receive, not the cost they must pay. Adobe's Flash player, for example, is free software in the economic sense, but is still at the core of proprietary (non-free) software (and formats). Specifically, free software refers to four core freedoms: the freedom to run the software, the freedom to study and modify the software, the freedom to redistribute the software, and the freedom to distribute your modifications.

As the Free Software Movement argues, non-free software risks software that can control the user (with the publisher controlling the software). This creates the potential for the software becoming an instrument of unjust power. Today, it's not uncommon for proprietary software to spy on users (e.g., phoning home), to restrict them (e.g., DRM), to censor them (e.g., corporate firewalls), or to take advantage of them (e.g., unskippable commercials). This becomes even more important as the Internet of Things emerges, and risks turning the world into "the Internet of telemarketers" or "the Internet of snoopers." Free software places power back in the hands of users and ensures users control the software they use, not the other way around. Obligation to give back: Open source is the give-a-penny-take-a-penny jar of software. If you consume open source, be it a server, a desktop publishing application, or a software library, you have an obligation to give back to the community. After all, without the contribution of others, the micro- and macroeconomic motivations would no longer hold true, and open source as we know it would cease to exist. This is the Golden Rule, or in traditional philosophical terms, a categorial imperitive.

Governments should give what they've developed to the people who pay for their development: If the development costs are paid by a government, then there's an additional argument for giving back. Governments take money (taxes) to perform services for their populace. For example, the US federal government was established through its Constitution by we the people to perform a number of important tasks. If the populace (we the people) are paying for the development of software, it stands to reason that we should receive what we paid to develop, including the software we paid to develop.

Teaching the next generation: Many of the industry's most prominent engineers today cut their teeth by learning from open source. When software's underlying code is made available for inspection, consumers can learn how their favorite software works and computer science courses can analyze how the industry's cutting edge technology is built. This goes a long way to train the next generation of software engineers (who without open source would be left guessing at the inner-workings of prior iterations).

Transparency motivations Open source allows for greater transparency of process, whether that's the transparency necessary to check a government action or the quasi-governmental function of a private company's software.

Showing your work: As the government increasingly relies on technology to regulate industries and deliver citizen services, being able to see the underlying algorithms and processes are essential to checking the government's work. If a closed-source software package is used to calculate my taxes or allocate broadcast frequencies, how do I know that the process, our process, is fair and accurate? Whereas human processes can't be copyrighted, when close source, such processes become a black box, minimizing the potential for a citizen counterbalance.

Positions of public trust: As the software produced by private corporations are increasingly placed in positions of public trust, the transparency obligation extends into the private sector as well. Did the voting machine accurately count my vote? When given a lose-lose choice, does the self-driving car conform to community norms? For example, if a closed-source software package is used to compare DNA at a crime scene, unlike a medical expert who can be cross examined, that proprietary algorithm is shielded from scrutiny by copyright (or patent) law. Open source, at least partial open source of particular components, will become essential as private companies automate quasi-government functions.

Participatory motivations Open source affords software stakeholders, both technical and non-technical, the opportunity to shape any given software development project.

Direct democracy: True direct democracy (where every citizen votes on every issue) isn't tenable given the size of most democracies. Nor have citizen been able to participate directly in most issues, due to technical constraints. Open source changes that by allowing software stakeholders to participate directly in the software development process (as software is increasingly relied on to codify regulatory and service-delivery preferences and norms). Think the process of buying health care is confusing? Open an issue. Believe the government should use more open source, submit a pull request. The White House is already doing this for many IT-centric policies like the Digital Services Playbook, HTTPS, and open data policies.

Customer feedback: Open source empowers consumers to have a combined, powerful voice in the private sector development process. Think of it like Yelp for software. Without Yelp, a restaurants is free to upset a single customer. At most, that dissatisfied patrons could dissuadee 5-10 other potential patrons. In a post-Yelp world, customers read the reviews of strangers before they choose where to go. Open source amplifies the voice of software consumers within the consumer-publisher relationship. Not to mention, the feedback the private company receives can go towards better informing product decisions and improve the overall product. Open source gives companies a direct line to their most passionate customers.

Personal motivations If you're a developer (or an aspiring developer), open source can provide an easy (and free) onramp to a path for personal growth within the software development community.

Learn to code: Open source is a great way to learn how to code. Want to know how your favorite website works? Clicking "view source" in your web browser can go a long way to point you in the right direction. You can read the documentation of the software that powers it, and potentially even stand up your own clone. Want to learn more? Join the local meetup for the framework or language. Better still, submit a pull request to the project to fix a small bug or add a new feature. While there are certainly time and opportunity costs involved, all of this comes without any direct cost to the aspiring developer, at least not in terms of software, and is infinitely more inclusive than doing the same within a proprietary community, especially as an outsider. There's a reason nearly every coding school today outside of traditional academia teaches open source.

It's fun: According to Wikipedia, open source is a hobby. In fact, open source has traditionally had the reputation of being the product of hobbyists (although I'd argue that's less true today). Open source is fun. If you're a hacker it provides an endless set of ever-changing set of Rubix cubes for you to solve on weekends. Just as puzzles (both crossword and jigsaw) provide bite-sized intellectual escapes, the order and symmetry of open source can often be a rock garden of code (especially for those for which football is an embarrassing non-starter).

There are many reasons why you should prefer consuming, publishing, collaborating on, and supporting open source, and if yours isn't listed here, I'd love to hear (and add) it. Whatever your reason, it's clear open source isn't the next big thing. Open source is already here.

What is open source? October 24, 2019 October 24, 2019 • 7-minute read Copy URL JUMP TO SECTION Overview The history of open source How does it work? Linux and open source Free vs. closed vs. open source Values of open source The open source movement Why choose Red Hat? Overview Open source is a term that originally referred to open source software (OSS). Open source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit.

Open source software is developed in a decentralized and collaborative way, relying on peer review and community production. Open source software is often cheaper, more flexible, and has more longevity than its proprietary peers because it is developed by communities rather than a single author or company.

Open source has become a movement and a way of working that reaches beyond software production. The open source movement uses the values and decentralized production model of open source software to find new ways to solve problems in their communities and industries.

What makes software open source? The history of open source is the history of the internet In the 1950s and 1960s researchers developing early internet technologies and telecommunication network protocols relied on an open and collaborative research environment. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which would later become the foundation for the modern internet, encouraged peer review and an open feedback process. User groups shared and built upon one another’s source code. Forums helped facilitate conversation and develop standards for open communication and collaboration. By the time of the birth of the internet in the early 1990s, the values of collaboration, peer review, communication, and openness were written into its foundations.

See how far open source has come How does an open source development model work? An open source development model is the process used by an open source community project to develop open source software. The software is then released under an open source license, so anyone can view or modify the source code.

Many open source projects are hosted on GitHub, where you can access repositories or get involved in community projects. Linux®, Ansible, and Kubernetes are examples of popular open source projects.

At Red Hat, we use an open source software development model to create our enterprise open source products and solutions. Red Hat developers actively participate in hundreds of open source projects across the IT stack.

We start with community-built open source software that meets the needs, partially or fully, of our customers. Red Hat builds upon these open source projects, hardening security, patching vulnerabilities, and adding new enterprise features.

We then contribute these improvements back to the original project for the benefit of the community as a whole.

As customers use our software, they provide feedback, submit bug reports, and request additional features as their needs shift. This input guides Red Hat's development.

Learn more about Red Hat's development model Linux and open source Linux is a free, open source operating system (OS), released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It’s also become the largest open source software project in the world.

The Linux operating system was created as an alternative, free, open source version of the MINIX operating system, which was itself based on the principles and design of Unix.

Because Linux is released under an open source license, which prevents restrictions on the use of the software, anyone can run, study, modify, and redistribute the source code, or even sell copies of their modified code, as long as they do so under the same license.

Learn more about Linux What’s the difference between free, closed, and open source software? For a long time open source software held the earlier label of "free software." The free software movement was formally established by Richard Stallman in 1983 through the GNU Project. The free software movement organized itself around the idea of user freedoms: freedom to see the source code, to modify it, to redistribute it—to make it available and to work for the user in whatever way the user needed it to work.

Free software exists as a counterpart to proprietary or "closed source" software. Closed source software is highly guarded. Only the owners of the source code have the legal right to access that code. Closed source code cannot be legally altered or copied, and the user pays only to use the software as it is intended—they cannot modify it for new uses nor share it with their communities.

The name "free software," however, has caused a lot of confusion. Free software does not necessarily mean free to own, just free to use how you might want to use it. "Free as in freedom, not as in beer" the community has tried to explain. Christine Peterson, who coined the term "open source," tried to address this problem by replacing ‘free software’ with ‘open source’: "The problem with the main earlier label, ‘free software,’ was not its political connotations, but that—to newcomers—its seeming focus on price is distracting. A term was needed that focuses on the key issue of source code and that does not immediately confuse those new to the concept."

Peterson proposed the idea of replacing "free software" with the term "open source" to a working group that was dedicated, in part, to shepherding open source software practices into the broader marketplace. This group wanted the world to know that software was better when it was shared—when it was collaborative, open, and modifiable. That it could be put to new and better uses, was more flexible, cheaper, and could have better longevity without vendor lock-in.

Eric Raymond was one of the members of this working group, and in 1997 he published some of these same arguments in his wildly influential essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". In 1998, partly in response to that essay, Netscape Communications Corporation open sourced their Mozilla project, releasing the source code as free software. In its open source form, that code later became the foundation for Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

Netscape’s endorsement of open source software placed added pressure on the community to think about how to emphasize the practical business aspects of the free software movement. And so, the split between open source and free software was cemented: "open source" would serve as the term championing the methodological, production, and business aspects of free software. "Free software" would remain as a label for the conversations that emphasized the philosophical aspects of these same issues as they were anchored in the concept of user freedoms.

By early 1998 the Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded, formalizing the term open source and establishing a common, industry-wide definition. Though the open source movement was still met with wariness and corporate suspicion from the late 1990s into the early 2000s, it has steadily moved from the margins of software production to become the industry standard that it is today.

Free software can actually be more expensive than paid alternatives What are the values of open source? There are lots of reasons why people choose open source over proprietary software, but the most common ones are:

Peer review: Because the source code is freely accessible and the open source community is very active, open source code is actively checked and improved upon by peer programmers. Think of it as living code, rather than code that is closed and becomes stagnant. Transparency: Need to know exactly what kinds of data are moving where, or what kinds of changes have happened in the code? Open source allows you to check and track that for yourself, without having to rely on vendor promises. Reliability: Proprietary code relies on the single author or company controlling that code to keep it updated, patched, and working. Open source code outlives its original authors because it is constantly updated through active open source communities. Open standards and peer review ensure that open source code is tested appropriately and often. Flexibility: Because of its emphasis on modification, you can use open source code to address problems that are unique to your business or community. You aren’t locked in to using the code in any one specific way, and you can rely on community help and peer review when you implement new solutions. Lower cost: With open source the code itself is free—what you pay for when you use a company like Red Hat is support, security hardening, and help managing interoperability. No vendor lock-in: Freedom for the user means that you can take your open source code anywhere, and use it for anything, at anytime. Open collaboration: The existence of active open source communities means that you can find help, resources, and perspectives that reach beyond one interest group or one company. The open source movement beyond software Open source is about a lot more than code. At Red Hat, we celebrate what communities are doing with open source technology today with Open Source Stories. Open Source Stories is a multimedia series that celebrates how community, meritocracy, and a free exchange of ideas can unlock potential across a range of disciplines. Check out these recent highlights:

What are the farmers of tomorrow doing with open tools and principles today? Learn how a teacher and an afterschool club built a creative community through open leadership and transformed a school and a city in the process. Femi Owolade-Coombes discusses how the power of open source and community can unlock potential for young coders. Alicia Gibb explains what the open hardware movement is and why it matters. Why choose Red Hat for open source? Red Hat is the largest open source company in the world. We build and support open source products from open source projects. We give back to the projects and communities we engage in. We defend open source licenses. With open source, we equip our customers for success. We take community-built code and harden its security, add features, and make it enterprise-ready and scalable. Then we push these improvements back out to the original project to benefit the community as a whole.

Learn more Keep reading ARTICLE

What's the difference between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Both are operating system technologies, but Fedora is built by an open source community while Red Hat Enterprise Linux is developed by Red Hat with the explicit intent of being used as an enterprise IT platform.

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