[RESOLVED] What is the meaning of Open Source Softwares?

[Harsh Gupta]

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.

[honeybee]

What Wikileaks seems to be doing, if all that's true, is making the code open source in the true sense of the words. What the programmers are bit*ching about is they will lose all control over their own work.

So the programmers are wrong and wikileaks is right.

I am with Microsoft in this one!

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[NeedSomeAnswers]

You do realise that that article was trying to be funny, and is in no way real ?

You can tell from in particular the quotes from various people in the text, but also just look at the comments at the bottom.

[honeybee]

See, that's the problem with open source software. With Microsoft, we take things seriously!

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[ntg]

That's hilarious.

[Harsh Gupta]

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I should get some sleep now!!!

[tr333]

The Free Software Definition
Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre

[arunb]

there is nothing frightening about Open Source Software. Its better than proprietary softwares where you (or other more knowledgeable users) do not know the weakness/bugs in the system.

With open source software, the code is freely available to all, so any bugs/mistakes/weaknesses are easily found out and rectified.

[ntg]

Its better than proprietary softwares where you (or other more knowledgeable users) do not know the weakness/bugs in the system.

I love open source software but that's a matter of opinion.

With open source software, the code is freely available to all, so any bugs/mistakes/weaknesses are easily found out and rectified.

Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow? Not really. There's no correlation between difficult, hard to catch bugs and number of people eyeballing the source. After all, even the most popular and reliable open source packages have bugs.