Contributors and Distributors
Open source software is written by computer programmers who generously distribute it to their friends, employers, or customers. Often these programmers work for companies that aggregate code written by many programmers into a functional whole; those companies then distribute the aggregated work to the world. Important computer software is usually too big and complicated to be written by one person acting alone—although each component of software always starts with one person acting alone—and it almost always requires collaboration and joint development.
This is not a unique process to open source. Commercial software has long been created and distributed collaboratively. What is unique about the open source process ...
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