what does open source mean?

[honeyshape]

what does open source mean?

www.myspace.com/tankengineband

[stevie]

Means the code is able to be manipulated/programmed (it's made available by initial programmers) by a third party to usually increase functionality or speed development. i.e Microsoft Windows - closed; Linux - open source.

Steve

[honeyshape]

So when they say somethiing like "Safari is open source" how is that an advantage?

www.myspace.com/tankengineband

[stevie]

I have no idea what safari is except for looking at lots of animals that want to eat you!

In that context, they probably mean you can take the source code (supplied by them) and customise it yourself to give YOU the functionality you require.

Steve

[honeyshape]

Thanks steve,

(safari is the mac web browser)

www.myspace.com/tankengineband

[Artemiy]

And now let the open source freak speak

"Open source" indeed means that the code of the software is available to anyone. You are free to modify it to add something new, or fix bugs, etc. This is a very good way of joining forces of many people and companies together.

Many parts of Mac OS X are open source, but not because of Apple but because they took many great open source programs as a foundation of OS X - like the FreeBSD kernel, Bash shell and GNU system utilities, CUPS printing system, etc.

Safari is not a completely open source software, but Apple WebKit is - as it is based on the KHTML rendering engine from the KDE Linux desktop project. Now also Nokia took the KHTML/WebKit for their new phones, this means today three companies, KDE, Apple and Nokia work on the same project, which allows for more features developed.