WEBGlossary

Open Source

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Web Development
Imagine buying a cake and getting the exact recipe along with it. You can bake the same at home, add more sugar or replace the cream. This is Open Source. In contrast, closed source (like Windows or iOS) is a cake, the recipe of which is kept in strict secrecy.

How do they make money on this?

If the program is free, where does the money come from? The business model of Open Source is to sell services, not the code itself: • Hosting: The code is free, but it costs money to deploy it on the company's cloud. • Support (Enterprise Support): Large corporations pay for the fact that developers are guaranteed to fix bugs within 24 hours. • Premium functions (Open-core): The basic version is open, and additional Enterprise modules are paid.

Popular Open Source products

The entire Internet is based on Open Source. These are the Linux operating system (running on 90% of the world's servers), WordPress (running on 40% of all sites), Android (based on Linux) and many AI models (such as Meta's Llama).

Business benefits

01Independence (No Vendor Lock-in)

You are not tied to a single provider (as is the case with SaaS). If the development company goes out of business, you still have the code and can hire other programmers to support it.

02Security

Because the code is seen by thousands of programmers around the world, bugs and vulnerabilities are found and fixed much faster than in closed corporations.

/ FAQ

Yes, if it's a popular project with an active community (many 'stars' on GitHub). But it's important to check the type of license (MIT, GPL, etc.), because some of them prohibit commercial use without opening your own code.

/ Related terms

Open Source
/ Open Source

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