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• open-source
  open-source

  adjective

  pertaining to or denoting software whose source code is available free of charge to the public to use, copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute.
• open source
  open source

open-source

American  

[oh-puhn-sawrs, -sohrs] / ˈoʊ pənˈsɔrs, -ˈsoʊrs /

adjective

1. Computers. pertaining to or denoting software whose source code is available free of charge to the public to use, copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute.

2. pertaining to or denoting a product or system whose origins, formula, design, etc., are freely accessible to the public.

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open source British  

noun

1. 1. intellectual property, esp computer source code, that is made freely available to the general public by its creators

   2. ( as modifier ) Compare closed source

      open source software

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open-source Scientific  

1. Relating to source code that is available to the public without charge. Open-source code is often enhanced, improved, and adapted for specific purposes by interested programmers, with the revised versions of the code are made available to the public. For example, most of the code in the Linux operating system is open-source.

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Etymology

Origin of open-source

First recorded in 1960–65

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

open-source open source

The open-source AI assistant OpenClaw went viral in January, but using it required a certain level of technical knowledge, creating a barrier for ordinary consumers.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 23, 2026

Xi himself is encouraging Chinese AI firms to develop more affordable, open-source models - which allow people, companies and countries to modify it as they wish.

From BBC ● Sep. 22, 2026

Companies in China benefit from cheap operating costs, including inexpensive open-source models from Chinese AI firms and proximity to China’s dense manufacturing supply-chain networks.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 20, 2026

In July, Open AI models circumvented human controls placed on them and hacked into Hugging Face, a repository for open-source AI models.

From MarketWatch ● Sep. 14, 2026

At the moment, he had NT 5, NT 4, Work Station, Windows 98, and he and Eric had begun fooling around with Linux, the complex, open-source software system rapidly spreading across the world.

From "Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho" by Jon Katz

The Chinese AI industry has so far focused not on creating frontier models but releasing what is known as open weight models - downloadable and tweakable in a similar way to open source software.

From BBC ● Sep. 23, 2026

“The big labs appear to know they are at peak power and want to lock it down by coordinating to prevent competition from open source and startups.”

From MarketWatch ● Sep. 14, 2026

“It was a major attack in terms of what we see in volume,” said Marty Haught, director of open source at Ruby Central, the nonprofit company that operates RubyGems.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 11, 2026

And they're gaining additional interest at a time when the open source market is dominated by Chinese AI models like Qwen, DeepSeek and GLM.

From BBC ● Aug. 14, 2026

Most of the actionable intelligence the National Security Agency and CIA scoop comes from open source information.

From "Burning Blue" by Paul Griffin