Open source software is built by the community, for the community. The source code is made publicly available online, licensed in a way that permits everyone to use and modify it. It is communal code.

Who uses open source software?

Today, everyone from small startups to governments use open source software. Need evidence? The Government of Canada website is using jQuery, an open source project. In fact, 77% of the top 100,000 websites use jQuery.

Most modern programmers will use open source software during every working day simply because it makes their lives easier!

Imagine you are cooking a meal. Do you take a block of steel and make yourself a DIY knife? This guy did, but chances are you don't. You take a knife, and a pot, and Google a recipe on the internet and then you cook your meal. You use existing tools to help you accomplish your goal.

Programming is similar. You can code everything from scratch, or you can re-use existing code. Some tasks end up being so repetitive that programmers create open source software to solve the problem.

Where can I find open source software?

The modern coder uses many open source services. Often, projects are maintained on services like Github. These services let users collaborate & build the open source software. For example, you can find the source code for the popular website platform Wordpress on Github.

Services like the Node Package Manager (NPM) allow programmers to easily install and use the open source software. For example, you can find Electron, a popular tool to build applications on NPM.