Hello all,

I was reading an article by Steve Yegge titled "Wikileaks To Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects With All That Private/Final Bullshit Removed".

My basic understanding for Open-Source Softwares (OSS) was that OSS is any software which source code is also released to public and users have freedom to use, study, modify, and redistribute the derived project.

But the article has left me confused. I am not talking about GNU and/or other similar licenses, but the meaning of open-source, especially Open-Source Java projects or open-source Python projects etc (sans .Net).

Let's take Ubuntu. Isn't it open-source? Don't we, as end-users, have access to its source code? Can't we modify it to suit our needs? When we have source code, what does it mean that Wikileaks is planning to release source code for open-source projects? For any open-source project, how can author stop end-users from modifying abstract/private/final bits of code?

This is by no means to start Open-source vs. Microsoft war. I just want to understand open-source in detail.

Thank you.