Jump To:

• 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.

---

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

---

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.

---

Etymology

Origin of open-source

First recorded in 1960–65

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

open-source open source

Driven by an "open-source" approach, where AI start-ups share their code, Chinese innovation has been able to catch up faster than expected, despite US export controls over critical advanced chips.

From BBC ● Aug. 24, 2026

Those techniques were behind the “DeepSeek shock” in January 2025, when Liang’s company released a powerful but inexpensive new open-source model and U.S. stocks briefly swooned at the unexpected rise of Chinese competition.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 21, 2026

Open-weight models typically share only the numerical parameters, or “weights,” that underlie them, while true open-source models allow full access to training data and code.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 18, 2026

Plus, using Nvidia’s AI technology and open-source models could allow Apple to focus elsewhere on its chip development.

From MarketWatch ● Aug. 17, 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

Rather than spending billions on a massive general-purpose foundation model from scratch, the company fine-tuned an open source base model in-house.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 24, 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

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

He said Meta would also release a new class of open source models, designed to run on a laptop.

From Barron's ● Aug. 10, 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