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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

Artex had been open-source -- allowing programmers to download its underlying code and customise it to suit their purposes.

From Barron's ● Oct. 9, 2026

It’s the tech that’s powering its creepy glasses, its open-source coding model, and now its bid into the battle of personal agents that will basically turn the experience of scrolling online into a water slide.

From Slate ● Oct. 3, 2026

In an earlier incident an OpenAI system accessed the internet and breached the open-source developer platform Hugging Face.

From BBC ● Oct. 2, 2026

He pushed for the broad dissemination of open-source AI models, which can be downloaded freely and used at a low cost.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 23, 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

“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

Decisions about whether these tools should be open source carry significant weight given their potential to do harm.

From BBC ● Aug. 14, 2026

Rizzo expects what he calls an “80:20 world” wherein 80% of the AI tokens used by corporates are open weight or open source and 20% of them are frontier like Anthropic or OpenAI.

From MarketWatch ● Aug. 12, 2026

Meta, Zuckerberg said, was “strongly supportive of open source, including open source AI models.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 11, 2026

If anything, Jesse spends more time online now; the things that draw him there—games, weblogs, chat and messaging systems, open source operating programs—have become far more advanced and compelling.

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