I don’t know (but wanna learn) programming, but, for example, can’t you inspect the code of an app if it’s installed?
(yeah this is kind of a stupid question.)
EDIT: Thanks for the clarification, guys!
Your computer’s CPU doesn’t understand human language or code, so programs are compiled from human-readable programming languages (like C++, Rust, etc.) into binary machine code. Machine code is basically just a bunch of CPU instructions and data that are formatted specifically for your CPU’s architecture (depending on if it’s x86, ARM, etc.).
Most of the time, when you install a program/app/game, you’re only getting the compiled binary in your CPU’s machine code, so you couldn’t view the original “source code” without going through a complex process called “decompilation”. And even then, you wouldn’t have the legal rights to share or modify that code for others to use.
For something to be considered truly “open source”, it not only makes the original source code available to the user, it also publishes that code under a license like the GPL which gives the user certain rights to use, copy, and/or modify the code.
No.
First, “open source” doesn’t just mean “you can read the source”; it means that you have rights to modify it and make new versions too.
Second, compiled programs (e.g. most programs you run on a phone or a desktop PC) do not have source available for you to read.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks for clarifying.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but a good way to think about it if you’re not a programmer is to say “why do we need recipes when we can just buy a product in the store and read the ingredients list”.
Just because you know the ingredients, that doesn’t mean you know how to put them together in the right order, in the right quantities, and using the correct processes to recreate the finished product.
If a 5star chef is making a dish, I wouldn’t know what they put in it anyways, so I think this analogy still works.
If they would show me the recipe/source code, I probs would be astonished, like “Oh yeah, now I can taste the $(whatever ingredient) in it!”, but wouldn’t be able to put it together like them
Open source means you can read the source, Free software means you can modify and redistribute.
Well, no.
The term “open source software” was specifically invented to refer to the same set of software licenses as “free software”; but with a different political angle.
Really. You can look it up.
I remember reading the opposite back in the day, that this is why RMS dislikes the term “open source” and prefers “Free software” as more descriptive. Open source refers to software where you can read the source, but the license it’s under does not necessarily gaurantee freedom to the user.
The people who coined the term “open source software” disagree, though. They’re allowed to be right about the use of their own term.
(And extensionally, the set of software licenses accepted as “open source” by the “open source” people, and the set accepted as “free software” by the “free software” people, are the same set of licenses. Both agree that Microsoft “Shared Source” is not in this set, for example.)
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I’ll take your word for it :)
