Powered By Open Source

You may be wondering what “open source” is and how it’s relevant to this site. Generally speaking, open source can refer to any openly available information, but the term is commonly used to refer specifically to open source software.

Open source software is simply any software that makes the underlying code freely available and modifiable by everyone. For example, you can see (and copy) all of the code that powers this website right here.

Community Driven

Since anyone can view and modify open source code, the number of people contributing to a given project can quickly surpass the number of contributors to a closed source counterpart. People contribute to open source software in various ways.

Common contributions can come in the form of:

• Reporting issues, ideas, and feature requests.
• Writing code to address issues, features, and new ideas.
• Testing and reviewing software/code.
• Documenting and writing how-to guides.
• Being an active user and sharing your experiences with given software.
• Donating to help support the continued development of projects.
• Many other forms…

From these various contributors, an open community is formed to collaborate toward common goals which result in free and open technologies which are accessible to everyone.

Security

Despite common misconceptions in both directions, open source software isn’t inherently more or less secure than closed source software.

One commonly held belief by proponents of closed source software is that if anyone can read your code then “the cat’s out of the bag”, so to speak, and any potential hacker could find the vulnerabilities and quickly exploit them. There is some truth in this, however this belief is based on the concept of “security through obscurity” which is effectively the idea that if vulnerabilities are not “known” or obvious that things are secure. This seems reasonable until you account for human ingenuity; people are clever and direct access to code is far from the only way to discover flaws in various technologies. Vulnerabilities can go undiscovered for years by the companies who own the closed-source software, while potential bad actors may quietly be discovering and taking advantage of those vulnerabilities long before they are ever fixed.

A commonly held belief by proponents of open source software is that due to the fact the code can be thoroughly understood and scrutinized by anyone, any potential vulnerabilities will be discovered and fixed quickly resulting in software that is difficult to exploit even if you understand exactly how it works. There is also some truth in this, but this idea is based on a best case scenario. While many prominent open source software projects with big communities have positive security track records, there are many projects which exist with only a small number of contributors. If there aren’t enough people consistently discovering and helping to fix issues, they may never get resolved.

Closed Source Vs. Open Source

Closed source code is owned/developed by a company and more and more commonly are being provided as a service in the modern era of “cloud computing”.

Examples of closed source software:

• Microsoft Windows
• Adobe Photoshop
• Popular social media websites
• Your banking website
• Tractor ECU’s
• Electronic voting machines

Open source software may or may not be sponsored and primarily developed by a company, but the nature of it being open and free means it is typically community-driven. Despite its often humble nature, open source software powers a significant portion of the internet and is even embedded inside many unsuspecting devices like your wireless router or “smart” appliances.

Examples of open source software:

• Linux (Ubuntu/Red Hat/Android/embedded/etc.)
• Wordpress
• Apple’s underlying operating system (Darwin Unix)
• Browsers like Firefox, Chromium (core of Chrome), Brave, etc.
• The vast majority of programming languages everything else is developed on top of (C/Python/PHP/GO/Javascript/HTML/etc.)
• This website!

One is not objectively better than the other; they can both have their place. But when it comes to community, open source has a clear advantage.