Open Source

open source, social movement, begun by computer programmers, that rejects secrecy and centralized control of creative work in favour of decentralization, transparency, and unrestricted (“open”) sharing of information. Source refers to the human-readable source code of computer programs, as opposed to the compiled computer programming language instructions, or object code, that run on computers but cannot be easily understood or modified by people.

In closed-source, or proprietary, software development, only the object code is published; the source code is held secret in order to control customers and markets. Open-source projects reject this practice and publish all their source code on the Internet under licenses that allow free redistribution. An important feature of open-source development is that the resulting extensive peer review seems to do a better job of minimizing computer bugs and computer security risks than the typical in-house process of quality assurance at closed-source vendors.

Beyond computer software, the concept of open source has been used to create free online databases and by commercial Internet vendors to populate reviews of items for sale, such as books, music, and movies.