Asklemmy

44336 readers

1266 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

What is the meaning of close source? (lemy.lol)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by DenizEfeDEX@lemy.lol to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I mean can't someone steal code from the devices file manager? or create his own fork?(Sorry for bad English)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

In addition to what others said about the availability of the source code itself, there's a whole legal framework around it.

A company could have code where the source is publicly available, but they still could say that you are not allowed to copy, fork, sell/distribute it. In that case, there wouldn't physically be anything preventing you from doing it, which sounds strange, until you think about how that's the exactly how it works for books, music, movies, etc.

There's also an in-between for software that's not publicly open source, but is open source to users. A company could sell you their software, and deliver it to you as open source code.