As you read this, countless programmers worldwide are collaborating to write, refine, and debug open-source software. Open-source pioneer Richard Stallman estimates that a million programmers now contribute to these efforts, in which the original written form of the code–the source–is made freely available for everyone to work on and worry over. Once a fringe phenomenon, the practice has grown into a major force in software development.
Open source is both a movement and a method. Partisan passions rage, but politics and polemics aside, the open strategy for constructing and maintaining programs may offer some distinct advantages over the closed-door development practices that dominate commercial software.
The most common argument for open-source development, and perhaps its greatest strength, is the sheer number of people who address a given problem. Every line of code, and its relationship to many others, is scrutinized again and again in an almost obsessive-compulsive competition to be the first to find a problem or its solution. In principle, and often in practice, this transparency can generate cleaner, more economical code with fewer bugs or vulnerabilities (for a discussion of the problems with mainstream software, see “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta”). There are, of course, no guarantees, but the reliability record of open-source software is excellent.
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