What is "open-source"

Open source software is software distributed under an open source license. This license specifically allows anyone to copy, modify, extend and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees to the original authors. Many open source licenses require that source code be released for software that includes modified parts of source open software.

There are dozens of open source licenses, the best known of them is the GNU General Public License or GPL. To determine whether a special license should be considered an Open Source license, the Open Source Initiative created a Open Source Definition.

Open source software often, but not always, evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as (large) companies.

Open source software is considered software free , so anyone, person or company, is free to do almost anything with it. However, open source does not mean that the software is free as in free beer (free Beer). Companies and individuals are authorized to charge for the software.

The code is not open source if it is only provided for revision , without the right to modify it and share the modified versions also for commercial use.