Open Source is about Trust

…or more correct, it’s also about trust, since open source has other aspects such as the freedom and rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs as defined by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). And free software is a matter of liberty not price. Yeah, they get it right!So many times, free software is associated with free as in beer, meaning you don’t have to pay for it, however open source is much more than that. But what the heck is open source if not free software and what does this have to do with trust?

Source code is a human readable form of instructions, but not immediately executable by a computer. At least it’s readable by programmers and lets assume for the purpose of this article that programmers are human 😉 . Source code is supposed to contain meaningful variable names and helpful comments that are intended only to be read by humans and compilers. The compiler (which isn’t human, but a computer program) converts the source code to object code so that it can be executed on the computer. Object code cannot be read by people; it is a sequence of bytes that encode specific machine instructions that will be executed by the microprocessor when it runs the program…