Summary

Open source, while being driven by a multitude of motivations and a diverse group of enthusiasts, is tied together by a common spirit; the idea of being able to freely share code and knowledge with others openly and do so through open collaboration in decentralized communities. Open source has been built on decades of collaborative spirit, with the ideal of sharing information to advance humanity. I’ve often seen open source described as the next Renaissance, harking back to the same outpouring of knowledge and innovation that advanced society but if you look at the last 3-4 decades, you can truly see how much our society has advanced in technology (which we could agree has opened up a new set of problems, but that is one of the aftereffects of progress, and we’ve tended to see society respond to and correct it over time).

This chapter was intended to give you a good foundation of the what and why of open source, which then lets us dig into the next key topic...