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What Is Open Source?

Why the idealistic promise of collaborative software often falls short of its potential.

Both define roughly the same freedoms, but free software advocates like Richard Stallman argue that “open source” is too ambiguous a term, and could cover less-free distribution models. Meanwhile, the risks of these precarious structures became very real when the XZ Utils project – a compressor / decompressor that is bundled with most Linux distributions – turned out to have been backdoored as part of a sophisticated operation that took place over years. Entrepreneurs can conceivably release a product and find a market without spending a single dollar, then raise money from venture capitalists only after they’ve shown strong signs of demand.

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