Open Source Beyond Software

The phrase 'Open Source', to many people, means 'software you don't have to pay for'but actually it's much more than that. It's a way of thinking and working focused on transparency and collaborating …

The phrase ‘Open Source’, to many people, means ‘software you don’t have to pay for’—but actually it’s much more than that. It’s a way of thinking and working focused on transparency and collaborating with others. It’s about sharing ideas, plans, and developments for the benefit of the commons. And it’s definitely not just software. Nupur Sharma would try to cover the domains and areas where things are open sourced other than software. Software is just the beginning. Open source has spread to other disciplines, from the hard sciences to the liberal arts. Biologists have embraced open source methods in genomics and informatics, building massive databases to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast, and other workhorses of lab research. NASA has adopted open source principles as part of its Mars mission. There are library efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has already digitized more than 6,000 books, with hundreds of volunteers typing in, page by page, classics from Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the same time, a related project, Distributed Proofreading, deploys legions of copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg texts are correct. There are open source projects in law and religion. There’s even an open source cookbook. Nupur would try to explain core principles of open source and how they can be benefited.