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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

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

open-source open source

OpenAI funded that and other audits, part of an effort by AI companies to help open-source projects address software vulnerabilities now being uncovered by artificial intelligence systems.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 21, 2026

Technologies that have entered the public domain through published papers or open-source releases are excluded from controls, according to the draft proposal.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 16, 2026

Meta launched its Spark model in April, marking a departure from its open-source model known as Llama, which lagged behind the rest of the industry.

From Barron's ● Oct. 12, 2026

Shares of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices fell for the fourth consecutive day Monday as investors looked past the companies’ latest announcements around open-source artificial intelligence.

From MarketWatch ● Oct. 12, 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

Alfozan started at Facebook in 2017 as a systems engineer, working on some of the company’s most popular open source software projects.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 15, 2026

Shares are rapidly becoming the way to play AI growth, safety, and the proliferation of open source large language models.

From Barron's ● Oct. 6, 2026

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

Slashdot is a center for the open source and free software movements.

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

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