Open-Source Software

Published Oct 14, 2022Updated Apr 27, 2023
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Open-source software (OSS) is source code that, through licensing, is available for view, modification, and distribution. Although anyone can contribute to OSS, it is usually maintained by a community of volunteer software developers who collaborate on websites like GitHub.

OSS is also thought to be more trustworthy. Since all the code is publicly available, any unwanted, nefarious behavior or activity will be quickly exposed by the development community maintaining the project.

Examples

Some examples of OSS software (along with their license and release year) include the following:

Languages

Name License Release Year Description
Go BSD (3-clause, patent-grant) 2012 A compiled programming language that is C-like in syntax but includes features like garbage collection and structural typing.
PHP PHP 1995 A general-purpose scripting language widely used as a server-side language for creating dynamic web pages.
R GNU GPLv2 1993 A popular interpreted programming language used for statistical computing and graphics.
Ruby Ruby 1995 A dynamic, general-purpose programming language commonly used for web development.

Other Softwares

Name License Release Year Description
Angular MIT 2016 A TypeScript-based framework used for building single-page applications.
Bootstrap MIT (Apache 2.0 prior to v3.1.0) 2011 A CSS framework created to help style web pages with mobile-first considerations in mind.
Express.js MIT 2010 A back-end Node.js framework used for building web applications and APIs, and providing network request functionality.
Font Awesome Freemium/GPL friendly 2012 An icon toolkit for the web, based on CSS and Less.
Git GPL-2.0-only 2005 A popular version control tool that developers use to collaborate, share, and save all relevant versions of their work to avoid it being lost.
jQuery MIT 2006 A popular JavaScript (JS) library intended to simplify JavaScript programming.
Linux GPLv2 1991 A family of Unix-like operating systems that are all based on the Linux kernel.
Next.js MIT 2016 A React-based framework that brings client-side development to the server-side along with built-in features like TypeScript support and route pre-fetching.
Node.js MIT 2009 A JS runtime environment for back-end development and building server-side or desktop applications.
NumPy BSD 1995 (as Numeric); 2006 (as NumPy) A popular Python library, used for complex mathematical operations and multi-dimentional arrays.
Ruby on Rails MIT 2004 A server-side Ruby framework used for building web applications.
React MIT 2013 A front-end library, written in JS, that is component-based and used for building web user interfaces.
React Native MIT 2015 A mobile development framework that works across different operating systems like iOS and Android.
Vim Vim 1991
Webpack MIT 2014 A JS module bundler that can be run on the Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems.

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