Benefits of Open Source Software

By open sourcing software, different people are able to come together and collaborate to improve it. Creating software and giving it away free is not what open source is what all about. Richard Stallman, the software freedom activist and GNU founder believes that meaning of free implies respecting users- the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes.

Open source software has its own advantages. From a user’s perspective,software is freely available. For developers, getting access to change the source code is a great advantage. Another advantage is as more and more developers contribute to it, adding to and modifying it makes software better, secure and bug-free compared to propriety software.

How Open Source work?

Let’s start taking an example of using an open source software. While using you face some bug or would like to add a new feature to it, so you contact the development team. If the development team likes your idea, you will be asked to write the code and submit it. You can write the task do the tests and submit the code. If the team accepts your code, your patch will be incorporated that will make the software better.

If you have created any application in open source you can upload it in sites like Github, Sourceforge or Google code. Once its out, people will come across it and start collaborating.