Blog post by Obiagba Mary.

As promised, I am back this week with this blog post explaining what the term "free and open-source" means. You will also learn what it means when used together with words like "software" and "community". Let's first dive into its relationship with "software".

There are two terms in there: "free" and "open-source". "Free" is closely associated with the user's freedom to use, study, modify and redistribute the software with or without changes to any part of the software. Users are usually free to do whatever they want with their copies of such software, regardless of how much they paid to obtain the software. "Open source" means that the source code of that software is accessible to the public. Anyone can see, and get copies of the source code of such software.

"Free and open-source" therefore means that the (copyright) owner of the software has chosen to make the software's source code available to the public, and permits the users to use, study, modify and redistribute the software. The owner shows this through a license (file that accompanies the source code). It is not entirely true that users are free to do whatever they want with their copies of the software. Some licenses are a bit more permissive than others. You can check out the article how open source licenses work and how to add them to your projects, in case you are curious about open source licenses.

Anyone can also help improve the software's original source code. I will now borrow (and tweak) Red Hat's definition of an open-source software community. A Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community is a group of people united by the shared purpose of developing, maintaining, extending, and promoting a specific body of free and open-source software.

We learned earlier how "free" does not mean that the software is free of cost. You can actually pay to obtain such software. That said, it is also safe to say that "free" and/or "open-source" does not mean that the contributions (i.e. the additions or improvements) you make to the original software are always unpaid. You can be paid for working on an open-source project. For now, the Code Collabo FOSS community has no paid product or opportunities. If anything about this changes, you will surely be informed about it.

The contributions you make to any free and open-source software project or community do not have to be code. In fact, I am contributing to open-source by writing you this article. In the next article, I will talk about "contributions" in detail. I hope this blog series sparks your interest to contribute to open-source projects (if you haven't started already).

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