Isn't technically everything open-source?

Sucuk@kbin.social to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 53 points –

I don't know (but wanna learn) programming, but, for example, can't you inspect the code of an app if it's installed?

(yeah this is kind of a stupid question.)

EDIT: Thanks for the clarification, guys!

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I remember reading the opposite back in the day, that this is why RMS dislikes the term "open source" and prefers "Free software" as more descriptive. Open source refers to software where you can read the source, but the license it's under does not necessarily gaurantee freedom to the user.

The people who coined the term "open source software" disagree, though. They're allowed to be right about the use of their own term.

(And extensionally, the set of software licenses accepted as "open source" by the "open source" people, and the set accepted as "free software" by the "free software" people, are the same set of licenses. Both agree that Microsoft "Shared Source" is not in this set, for example.)

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