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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

  noun

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

It’s become a big enough problem that the world’s main repository of open-source code—GitHub—has instituted new policies and features to combat it.

From The Wall Street Journal • May 22, 2026

They combed through CulturaX, one of the largest open-source Chinese-language data sets that AI labs use to train models—about 189 million documents scraped from the Chinese-language internet.

From The Wall Street Journal • May 19, 2026

The open-source system can also be used to monitor farmland and track which crops are being grown in which fields over time, building a detailed picture of UK agriculture.

From BBC • May 18, 2026

The huge, open-source Tessera system is not just for hedgehogs, however.

From BBC • May 18, 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