How did the open source movement change software forever?
Some of the most valuable software in the world is completely free.
The answer
The open source movement, formalized by Richard Stallman's GNU Project (1983) and the Free Software Foundation (1985), advocates for software whose source code is freely available to view, modify, and distribute. This philosophy produced Linux, Apache, Firefox, Python, and Git - all foundational to modern technology. Today, 96% of the world's top 1 million web servers run open source software. Major tech companies including Google, Microsoft, and Meta actively contribute to open source projects, and GitHub hosts over 200 million repositories.
Source: Open Source Initiative
- open source
- software
- community
- Linux
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