Open Source

The concept itself emerged as an alternative to proprietary software, when commercial companies closed access to the source code.

Features

. Software distributed as an Open Source product has a number of features:

1. The software products are delivered absolutely free of charge to the end user.
2. Developed by different people who use it themselves. They closely monitor the code of the program, promptly eliminating bugs or vulnerabilities that could lead to critical consequences.
3. Most Open Source products are compatible with different families of operating systems, meaning they are cross-platform.
4. The community of free software developers is open to feedback from users. Each of them can make a suggestion for improvement or adding a new feature.
5. Open Source solutions are updated much more often than commercial products. The end-user receives actual fixes instantly, as soon as they are fixed.
6. Active development of free software revives competition among commercial organizations, which contributes to the quality of the latter.
7. Active development of free software revives competition among commercial organizations, which contributes to the quality of the latter.
8. As a commercial basis, developers utilize a do-as-you-go option in their solutions. That is, users can voluntarily support programmers with financial means by transferring them to an electronic wallet.
9. Open software developers use the donation option as a commercial basis.
10. The majority of Open Source solutions are created under Unix/Linux operating systems, which reduces the risk of infecting a computer or server with a virus. This is due to the fact that malicious software is mostly written for Windows.
11. A lot of Open Source solutions are created for the Unix/Linux family of operating systems.

Examples

. Among the most famous open source products note WordPress – a content management system for websites. All features of the product are supplied to the user free of charge. As a programming language used PHP, the database – MySQL.

A free alternative to Microsoft Office is OpenOffice. The software features are identical, and the interface is very similar.

PHP programming language is based on scripts. It is used for most web applications and dynamic websites.

GIMP is an alternative to the commercial product Adobe Photoshop. The functions and features are completely identical to the commercial solution.

Mozilla Firefox is developed on the Quantum engine, distributed by default in many Linux distributions as the main browser in the OS.

Open Source solutions are delivered as an alternative to commercial software, but for free. Developers create a quality product, which promotes competition on the software market. If desired, users can independently modify the source code of Open Source products to suit their tasks.