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Open source software is written by computer programmers who generously distribute it to their friends , employers , or customers. Often these programmers work for companies that aggregate code written by many programmers into a functional whole; those companies then distribute the aggregated work to the world. Important computer software is usually too big and complicated to be written by one person acting alone ”although each component of software always starts with one person acting alone ”and it almost always requires collaboration and joint development. This is not a unique process to open source. Commercial software has long been created and distributed collaboratively. What is unique about the open source process is that once software has been licensed under an open source license, the collaborative process is no longer tied to a single individual or company. Because software freedom is promised by every open source license, users are free to take control of the software and do whatever they want with it. Everyone is free to become a contributor to or distributor of open source software, starting from anyone 's open source software. At least that is the promise, although incompatibilities between open source licenses are preventing that goal from being completely met. License compatibility is discussed in Chapter 10. |
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