People who study acoustics understand the fact that waves in the atmosphere attenuate and die out. For a wave to persist and live prominently, it has to resonate with the environment. Waves that resonate build on top of themselves. They strike a unique balance of parameters. Ideas work pretty much the same way. 

For an idea to grow into a game changer, it has to do more than just inspire a couple of folks. It has to resonate with people and affect their lives enough to get included in their social structure. 

There is something about computers that has resonated with humans. The past three decades saw the shift from the mechanical machines to computers. I call this a game changer because computers have infiltrated all facets of civil structure — economy, politics, sports, transport and pretty much every field that humans have endeavored.

Computers have affected social life too. Or, in this matter, computers have brought about a new civil structure: The open source community.

All computer hardware needs to be programmed in order to function. There are people who excel at just that — the programmers. Companies hire programmers. The programs that their employees write become intellectual property owned by the company. A typical example is the Microsoft Windows operating system. Microsoft owns that program. As a consumer, one pays for the operating system program when buying a computer.

Following that is where the information technology revolution got its catalyst. Unlike in other revolutions, some programmers said, we will not privatize the programs we write by marking them as closed intellectual property. So, they wrote programs and disclosed them for others to view and modify as per their wishes. 

An analogy would be making the formula for a drug freely available for everyone rather than owning it and charging others to produce it. A very prominent example is the Linux operating system. Linus Torvalds first wrote the Linux operating system program in 1991 and released it in 1994 for free modification. Unlike Windows, you can download Linux from the Internet for free.

The program or the code is also called the source code. Hence, the phrase open source meaning code that is open for access.

This method of opening up the program code had a multiplier effect. If all the people in the world work on a program to improve it, the program only gets better compared to a single company’s employees working on a program. The code that Linus Torvalds wrote was improved upon by thousands of others and now unites the most prominent open source community alive. 

An open source community is not without structure. Just providing access to the code does not guarantee its growth. The open source community is primarily made up of programmers who write code, collaborate and maintain the structure of the code. A perfect analogy would be to imagine a group of sculptors working on a single sculpture. 

Over the years, this style of coding has spread over the world. Pockets of open source communities have developed in different areas of computer applications. From programs that run on computers in space, to those that work in financial systems — open source programs are used everywhere.