Editorial: What Does Open Source Mean to You?

We love our themed weeks here on SitePoint. Earlier this year we had IoT week, which saw us (me in my tin hat) publishing articles focused on the intersection of the internet and the physical world. The week was a big success, and so now we're back by popular demand with an entire week dedicated to all things open source.

We'll get on to all the goodies we have lined up in a minute, but first I want to take a moment to reflect on what open source means for me.

The open source project I use most often is my computer's operating system (Linux Mint). It is stable, polished, has a sleek UI and puts a whole host of (awesome) free and open source software at my fingertips. It would be easy to take this for granted (I mean you just download it and install it, right?), but in reality it is made possible by an army of volunteers, who are hard at work behind the scenes. I think it's important we don't forget that.

The same goes for the large amount of open source JavaScript projects available to us developers. Whether they are intended to help you build amazing apps, or as a learning resource to help you level up your skills, these are all projects, supported and maintained by the community. Thanks to the collaborative nature of open source, you're free to download and modify any of them and, most importantly, to contribute any changes you make back to the project itself.

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by James Hibbard via SitePoint