Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source) defines open source as follows:

Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, [1] design documents, [2] or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration.

If you search online, you will find a number of definitions used:

• Red Hat (https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/open-source/what-is-open-source)
• IBM (https://www.ibm.com/topics/open-source)
• Opensource.com (https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-source)

While the definitions are certainly different, some common themes align here.

The first is the concept of source code being made freely available, allowing anyone to view, modify, and share the source code with others. This is often where people will start with open source, thinking of it as...

Open source as a term dates back to February 3rd, 1998, but the ethos and ideals date back decades before that. Let’s take a look back in time.

The concepts of viewing, modifying, and sharing, along with open collaboration, can be traced to way before the internet and computers. Much of this was commonplace in hacker and maker cultures, both rooted in artisan spirits. For hundreds and thousands of years, new technologies and innovations were born out of the sharing of ideas with each other, each time seeing the next effort built off of that of others before. The challenges were only the ability for ideas to travel, where Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press began the acceleration of knowledge that became the Renaissance.

There has always been a natural tension between the collaborative spirit and commercialization. The establishment of the system of patents in the 1400 and 1500s had the intention of protecting inventors but...

You can see that there has been a long and winding history of open source, which has predominately been driven by enthusiasts who were passionate about the technologies they worked with and, over time, brought in commercial investment while staying true to form with the ethos that grew these communities.

With those years of effort came many patterns of success and patterns that did not pan out as well. We have seen the concept of open source applied to different areas outside of computing, including quilting patterns, the home brewing of beer, genome patterns, and more. From these efforts we have seen a few patterns in how open source has been used with a degree of success – let us look at those.

Information sharing amongst enthusiasts

The earliest use we’ve seen of open source (and arguably most pervasive) is just being able to share information and knowledge with others with a common problem. It generally is the underlying motivation...

Now that I’ve walked through the what of open source along with its historical roots and how open source is used, to complete The Golden Circle [3], let’s look at the why of open source.

I heard Alan Clark of SUSE once describe open source as “the ultimate scratch-your-own-itch model,” meaning that participation is tied to whatever motivates the participant. As you can imagine, this makes the steering of an open source project challenging (another topic we will dig more into in later chapters, covering governance, bringing in new contributors, and growing contributors into maintainers in Chapter 5, Governance and Hosting Models). Still, it also makes answering the why open source question not one with a clear, universal answer.

The best way to answer the why is by looking at a few projects and understanding the motivations of those communities. Let’s take a look at some that hopefully will give you...

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...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/18/22440813/android-devices-active-number-smartphones-google-2021

[2] https://iwanttolearnruby.com/how-many-ruby-on-rails-developers-are-there/#1

[3] https://fourweekmba.com/golden-circle/

[4] https://www.php.net/history

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_virtualization#Hardware-assisted_virtualization