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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

Dimon temporarily chairs the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure, a coalition of about 50 companies that vets open-source code and strengthens security across a range of sectors.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 19, 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

In September, California-based PrismML released a compressed version of the popular open-source Qwen3.8 27B AI model.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 11, 2026

In July, open-source research organisation Myanmar Witness revealed that they had analysed hundreds of missing-person advertisements collected from Facebook between 2021 and 2025.

From BBC ● Oct. 10, 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

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

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

I’d begun writing for a new website, Slashdot.org, an intensely geeky techno/pop-culture site devoted to the open source Linux operating system and to 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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