Stupid Simple Open Source

Even if we don’t realize it, almost all of us have used open source software. When we buy a new Android phone, we read its specs and, usually, focus on the hardware capabilities, like CPU, RAM, camera, etc. The brains of these tools are their operating systems, which are open source software. The Android operating system powers more than 70 percent of mobile phones, demonstrating the prowess of open source software.

Before the free software movement, the first personal computer was hard to maintain and expensive; this wasn’t because of the hardware but the software. You could be the best programmer in the world, but without collaboration and knowledge sharing, your software creation will likely have issues: bugs, usability problems, design problems, performance issues, etc. What’s more, maintaining these products will cost time and money. Before the appearance of open source software, big companies believed they had to protect their intellectual property, so they kept the source code secret. They did not realize that letting people inspect their source codes and fix bugs would improve their software. Collaboration leads to great success.

What is Open Source Software?

Simply put, open source software has public source code, which can be seen, inspected, modified, improved or even sold by anyone. In contrast, non-open source, proprietary software has code that can be seen, modified and maintained only by a limited amount of people, a person, a team or an organization.

In both cases, the user must accept the licensing agreements. To use proprietary software, users must promise (typically by signing a license displayed the first time they run it) that they will not do anything with the software that its developers/owners have not explicitly authorized. Examples of proprietary software are the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office.

Users must accept the terms of a license when using open source software, just as they do when using proprietary software, but these terms are very different. Basically, you can do whatever you want as long as you include the original copyright and license notice in any copy of the software/source. Furthermore, these licenses usually state that the original creator cannot be liable for any harm or damage that the open source code may cause. This protects the creator of the open source code. Good examples of open source software are the Linux operating system, the Android operating system, LibreOffice and Kubernetes.

The Beginning of Open Source

Initially, software was developed by companies in-house. The creators controlled this software, with no right for the user to modify it, fix it or even inspect it. This also made collaboration between programmers difficult as knowledge sharing was near impossible.

In 1971, Richard Stallman joined the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. He noticed that most MIT developers were joining private corporations, which were not sharing knowledge with the outside world. He realized that this privacy and lack of collaboration would create a bigger gap between users and technical developers. According to Stallman, “software is meant to be free but in terms of accessibility and not price.” To fight against privatization, Stallman developed the GNU Project and then founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Many developers started using GNU in response to these initiatives, and many even fixed bugs they detected.

Stallman’s initiative was a success. Because he pushed against privatized software, more open source projects followed. The next big steps in open source software were the releases of Mozilla and the Linux operating system. Companies had begun to realize that open source might be the next big thing.

The Rise of Open Source

After the GNU, Mozilla, and Linux open source projects, more developers started to follow the open source movement. As the next big step in the history of open source, David Heinemeier Hansson introduced Ruby on Rails. This web application framework soon became one of the world’s most prominent web development tools. Popular platforms like Twitter would go on to use Ruby on Rails to develop their sites. When Sun Microsystems bought MySql for 1 billion dollars in 2008, it showed that open source could also be a real business, not just a beautiful idea.

Nowadays, big companies like IBM, Microsoft and Google embrace open source. So, why do these big companies give away their fearfully guarded source code? They realized the power of collaboration and knowledge sharing. They hoped that outside developers would improve the software as they adapted it to their needs. They realized that it is impossible to hire all the great developers of the world, and many developers are out there who could positively contribute to their product. It worked. Hundreds of outsiders collaborated on one of the most successful AI tools at Google, Tensorflow, which was a great success. Another success story is Microsoft’s open source .Net Core.

Why Would I Work on Open Source Projects?

Just think about it: how many times have open source solutions (libraries, frameworks, etc.) helped you in your daily job? How often did you finish your tasks earlier because you’d found a great open source, free tool that worked for you?

The most important reason to participate in the open source community is to help others and to give something back to the community. Open source has helped us a lot, shaping our world unprecedentedly. We may not realize it, but many of the products we are using currently result from open source.

In a modern world, collaboration and knowledge sharing are a must. Nowadays, inventions are rarely created by a single individual. Increasingly, they are made through collaboration with people from all around the world. Without the movement of free and open source software, our world would be completely different.  We’d live with isolated knowledge and isolated people, lots of small bubble worlds, and not a big, collaborative and helpful community (think about what you would do without StackOverflow?).

Another reason to participate is to gain real-world experience and technical upskilling. In the open source community, you can find all kinds of challenges that aren’t present in a single company or project. You can also earn recognition through problem-solving and helping developers with similar issues.

Finding Open Source Projects

If you would like to start contributing to the open source community, here are some places where you can find great projects:

CodeTriage: a website where you can find popular open source projects based on your programming language preferences. You’ll see popular open source projects like K8s, Tensorflow, Pandas, Scikit-Learn, Elasticsearch, etc.

awesome-for-beginners: a collection of Git repositories with beginner-friendly projects.

Open Source Friday: a movement to encourage people, companies and maintainers to contribute a few hours to open source software every Friday.

For more information about how to start contributing to open source projects, visit the newbie open source Git repository.

Conclusion

In the first part of this article, we briefly introduced open source. We described the main differences between open source and proprietary software and presented a brief history of the open source and free software movement.

In the second part, we presented the benefits of working on open source projects. In the last part, we gave instructions on how to start contributing to the open source community and how to find relevant projects.