Open source

Open source is the practice of publishing digital resources publicly along with their source code or source files, so that other people can use, study, modify and redistribute them. The idea is most commonly associated with open source software, meaning software that is released together with its source code, but it also extends to other kinds of digital material such as open source hardware, educational resources and typefaces. These resources are protected through legal frameworks such as open licenses or a public domain dedication, and their development often follows a model of open collaboration, a decentralized and peer to peer approach to production. Sharing source code is standard practice in software, but in other fields the underlying source files are not always made available, which can limit how much a user is able to modify the material even when they hold the legal right to do so; the term is also used in intelligence work to describe open source intelligence, and more loosely across other fields to describe public access and collaborative practice in general. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/