Importance of Open Source in Technology
What is an Open Source?
Open Source as a development model promotes universal access via a free license to a product’s design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint, including subsequent improvements to it by anyone. Open source is basically something that is available for all which implies that there is no real owner of it.
Open source works on the principle of collaboration. It believes in bringing all kinds of diverse mindsets and perspectives together. Open source gives you an opportunity to enhance and improve your skills by contributing in the real world projects other developers. (For instance Open Source Software is the prominent example of open collaboration).
Open Source Software
Open source software is the software whose source code is made freely available to the users who have all rights to use, modify, enhance or redistribute the code for any purpose. The copyright holder grants the freedom to the clients under a license. This makes the open source software “free”.
“Open source software is a commercial software” since although the company cannot sell the open source software but it can definitely sell services and products related to it. They can also add some additional features to the software and can sell that premium version. Thus “commercial” does not mean just “proprietary”.
Some prominent organizations involved with OSS development include Apache software foundation, Linux foundation, Eclipse foundation and Mozilla foundation.
Open Source Development tools
In OSS development tools are used to support the development of products and development of process itself. They optimize the process and make the outcomes of the projects way more effective. These tools are built by and for the developers to work in full capacity for free. However selection of these tools might be overwhelming. So let’s have a look at some of the best development tools.
Git
Git is an open source distributed version control system designed to handle both small and large projects. It is intended for organizing work among programmers, however it can also be utilized to track changes in any arrangement of documents. Its objectives include speed, data integrity, and backing for distributed, non-linear work processes. Git has changed the way people think about merging/branching by making these actions really simple and cheap. Git is used by companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and many more.
Bootstrap
Bootstrap is an open source CSS framework for developing responsive websites and mobile-front projects using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It affects the color, font, size and layout of web pages. A framework comes with some predefined terms which gives user the advantage of using those codes instead of creating the code from scratch. Bootstrap comes with a consistent framework that supports major of all browsers and CSS compatibility fixes. It also comes with several JavaScript components in form of jQuery plugins. This allows the user to build their web applications.
Eclipse
Eclipse is the most popular IDE used by Java developers and supports multiple languages like Java, JavaScript, C/C++, PHP, Rust etc. Eclipse is used in creating web, desktop and cloud IDEs. Some major advantages of using Eclipse are — refactoring, auto completion, debugging and navigation. The boot up time of Eclipse is short as compared to other IDEs. Moreover has the ability to manage multiple files and projects.
Open Source values
Most of the sites you use on daily basis are open source software like Facebook and Wikipedia. This clearly shows the prevalence of open source today. So how did open source managed to get so popular? Now this was possible because of some open source values like-
Abundant mindset
Since the source code is freely available it is effectively checked and improved by peer programmers with different mindsets. This brings all kinds of people with different backgrounds together and the fact that they are ready to collaborate with each other and contribute to a single code makes the source code a living one.
Vulnerability
Open source community believes in vulnerability. Now don’t presume vulnerability as weakness. Here vulnerability simply means working up on your strengths, bringing out your best work and putting it in front of people who can criticize your work and build upon. It means being aware of your strengths and rather than doing all work by yourself, you collaborate with people and work with their strengths as well. Practicing this will surely help you grow.
Transparency
Need to know precisely what sorts of information are moving where, or what sorts of changes have occurred in the code? Open source permits you to check and track that for yourself, without depending on vendor promises.
Taking initiative
While working on open source someone has to take the initiative to be the first person to start a particular project and whenever any contribution is made to any source code there is someone who took the initiative and decided to invest his efforts and time into the project.
Flexibility
Since open source focuses so much on modification, you are never restricted to write the code concerning your business or community in a particular way. Rather you can always rely on your peers and community to help you with implementing new solutions.
Advantages of contributing to an Open Source
It doesn’t matter whether you are a beginner or an experienced developer contributing to an Open Source has a lot of benefits at any stage. Some of them are listed below-
- While you learn coding you focus on a specific language and some basic syntax but while contributing to an open source you get to learn how to apply your learning in real world projects.
- Raising some doubts while solving others will not only make your concepts clear but also help in enhancing your skills.
- You can learn how a project is launched or published.
- You even learn how to use resources like Stack overflow and language documentation to solve your problems.
- Participating in open source competitions will give you exposure.
Apart from technological perspective Open Source has created a great impact on our society as a whole by influencing people and their cultures. Marten Mickos, CEO of HackerOne said “One of the greatest benefits of open source is that it has created a model where smart people who disagree with each other can collaborate with each other. It’s easy to collaborate if we agree, but open source enables collaboration even when people disagree, That is the true beauty of this model.”
To learn more about Open Source go to:https://www.google.com/search?q=open+source&oq=open+source+&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i59l4j69i60l3.8377j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
