Importance of “Open-Source” and why GitHub?
A technology enthusiast and anyone who aspires to be our already is in the information technology field has definitely come across the term open source software. While it is quite a large community, it still is not as popular or will known as it should be.
Open source software is definitely very important. But before understanding that, let’s understand what open-source software really means.
Conventionally, any particular software was owned by any one firm or organization. It was often distributed with license keys. This software was the proprietary of that particular organization and the clients would only get to interact it using the interface provided. Nobody knew how or what happened internally. A few years later, we came across another software approach. Here it was initially owned by an individual or a firm, but it wasn’t concealed. The source code was openly available for the users and other developers. This led to multiple different ideas and collaborations.
Since the code was openly available, there was nothing hidden from the user. The user was able to determine how data is collected from them and how it’s stored. It also led to a tremendous opportunity for developers and bug hunters to go through the code and contribute to large firms products. Today any developer can contribute to any feature of an software as long as the source code is open. And thus “open-source”.
One could say that these very results are the importance of open source. There are hundreds of developers and software engineers who contribute to different software. This has led to concepts which encourage people to find security and other bugs in a code and report it to the owner of the code. It is a similar concept to the olden times when people of their own accord captured criminals with bounties on their head. These people were called Bounty hunters. Today, the criminals are the bugs in the code and the hunters are called Bug Bounty hunters!
A very crucial tool that makes up the very foundation of opensource projects today is GitHub. Most college and university students, as well as companies use GitHub as a version control tool. But additionally it can be used as a platform for sharing opensource projects. Several individuals start off an project and push the repository on GitHub. Any other interested individual can clone this repository and contribute to it on his own system. Further, the owner of the repository can merge the changes made after verifying them.
This practice has helped several of us learn how projects work at professional level. It has also taught us the importance of writing readable code and how crucial documentation can be.
