Open source
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Open source (software) | |
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Interest of | • Nikolai Bezroukov • Lawrence Lessig • Roy Schestowitz • Softpanorama |
Publicly verifiable software. Recommended. |
Open source software is distributed with the source code, allowing computer scientists to verify its integrity and potentially to fix it themselves. Closed source, by contrast, cannot be verified by end users, and so is effectively impossible to change and may contain computer viruses, trojan horses or other such malware.
Origins
Originally, software coders and users were the same tiny set of academics, so all software was open source by default. Richard Stallman played a major role in the development of the open source movement and started the GNU project, which lead on to GNU/Linux in the 1990s.[1]
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