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Tag: open source

LibreOffice: An Open Source Alternative to Microsoft Office

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A VERY BRIEF LIBREOFFICE HISTORY In the early 1970s, Richard Stallman was a Harvard-educated software engineer working on artificial intelligence projects for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As software development migrated away from the university environment and into the private sector, jobs like Stallman’s were gradually eliminated, including his in the early 1980s. Stallman was not pleased that private industry was making money writing computer programs and believed that software is meant to be free. And so began the Free Software Foundation in 1985. Developers from...

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A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Open Source Software

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WHAT MAKES OPEN SOURCE DIFFERENT? The key difference between open source and other types of software is the license. All software is licensed in various ways; some other types of software cannot be inspected or modified, known as “closed source” or “proprietary” software. In this case, the source code is the legal property of the person or company that created it, and only they have the right to modify and distribute it. The source code for proprietary software is usually a highly guarded secret. Examples of this type of software include Adobe and Microsoft products....

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