As a result, people from the free software movement and the opensource camp often work together on practical projects such as softwaredevelopment. It is remarkable that such different philosophical viewscan so often motivate different people to participate in the sameprojects. Nonetheless, there are situations where these fundamentallydifferent views lead to very different actions.
Google Makes All Its Open Source Projects Available in One Place
C++ is one of the main development languages used bymany of Google's open-source projects. As every C++programmer knows, the language has many powerful features, butthis power brings with it complexity, which in turn can makecode more bug-prone and harder to read and maintain.
Our advice against using exceptions is not predicatedon philosophical or moral grounds, but practical ones. Because we'd like to use our open-sourceprojects at Google and it's difficult to do so if thoseprojects use exceptions, we need to advise againstexceptions in Google open-source projects as well.Things would probably be different if we had to do it allover again from scratch.
If you think of open source software as being primarily the work of hobbyists and lone developers, your impression is sorely out of date. While independent developers are still an important part of the open source community, today much of the work on open source projects is being done by corporate developers.
The list below highlights some of the leading for-profit companies that are using, sponsoring and contributing to open source projects. It includes a mix of large enterprises, small startups and everything in between. Some of the companies exclusively offer products based on open source software, while others sell a mix of proprietary and open source solutions. But all of these companies play a significant role in the open source community.
Why It Made the List: Adobe has a strong commitment to open source and has more than 250 public repositories on its GitHub site. Some of its best-known open source projects are developer tools like the PhoneGap web development framework, the Brackets text editor and the Topcoat CSS library. Adobe staff also contribute regularly to other open source projects like Gecko, Blink, WebKit, Apache Cordova, Flex, Felix and many others.
Why It Made the List: Unlike most of the other companies on this list, Black Duck is noteworthy not for its own contributions to open source projects but because it makes it easier for other organizations to use open source software. It offers three key projects: Hub for identifying and managing open source software at use in an environment, Protex for ensuring compliance with open source licenses and company policies, and Security Checker for identifying security vulnerabilities in open source software. It boasts more than 2,000 customers, including Intel, Nintendo, SAP and Samsung.
Why It Made the List: Chef is the name of both an open source systems integration framework and the company that owns that framework. As DevOps has become more widely adopted, Chef has emerged as one of the most popular tools for automating configuration management. In fact one TechCrunch ranking of the most popular open source projects listed Chef as number 23. Staff from the company also contribute to other open source projects, and it has approximately 70 repositories on its public GitHub site.
Why It Made the List: The leading social network has emerged as one of the leading advocates for open source software and hardware. In 2016, it was second on the list of companies with the most GitHub contributors (15,682). Its most popular open source projects include the React and React-native JavaScript development tools, Flow, HHVM, Relay and many others.
Why It Made the List: GitHub has become the de facto repository for open source projects. In a 2016 report, it boasted more than 5.8 million active users, more than 331,000 active organizations, and more than 19.4 million active repositories. The company has also created several open source projects of its own, including the Atom text editor, Hubot and Git Large File Storage (LFS).
Why It Made the List: Having released or contributed to more than 2,000 open source projects, Google is one of the most ardent corporate users and supporters of open source. It was fifth on the list of companies that had the most GitHub contributors in 2016 (and it also owns Angular, which was fourth on the list.) Well-known Google open source projects include Android, Chromium, Dart, Go, Kubernetes, TensorFlow and many others.
Why It Made the List: Gradle is the name of an open source Devops build tool and the company that maintains it. It was listed as number 17 on the TechCrunch list of top open source projects and claims more than 4 million downloads every month. Its users include many of the companies on this list, such as LinkedIn, Android, Netflix, Adobe and Elastic.
Why It Made the List: Another DevOps tools vendor, Hashicorp has created several open source projects, most of which are related to cloud infrastructure automation. The most notable of its projects is the Vagrant configuration tool, which was ranked as the 15th top open source project in existence. Its other open source efforts include Packer, Terraform, Vault, Consul and Nomad.
Why It Made the List: In 2016, Intel was the most active company contributing to the Linux kernel. Its employees made 14,384 changes to the code, which accounted for about 12.9 percent of the changes in the time period covered by the report. Its developers are contributing to dozens of other open source projects as well, and it is a member or sponsor of several open source foundations, including The Linux Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation and the OpenStack Foundation.
Why It Made the List: A decade or two ago, Microsoft would have belonged at the top of the list of opponents of open source software, but it has since completely reversed course. In fact, in 2016, Microsoft had more employees making contributions to GitHub projects than any other company. It now has partnerships with other leading open source companies, including Red Hat, and it has open sourced some of its most popular software, including its .NET development tools, Visual Studio Code, PowerShell Core, the CNTK deep learning toolkit, TypeScript, Redis and many others. It also supports Linux on its cloud computing service and takes a cross-platform approach to development.
Why It Made the List: The MongoDB database is one of the most popular NoSQL databases and was listed ninth on the list of influential open source projects. As the big data trend has taken off, interest in MongoDB has grown, and the software has now been downloaded more than 20 million times. Well-known users include Adobe, Amazon, Cisco, GitHub, Comcast, eHarmony, Twitter and The New York Times.
Why It Made the List: The streaming video service has been extremely active in contributing to open source projects and open sourcing the tools it develops in-house. Its projects include Genie, Inviso, Lipstick, Aegisthus, Nebula, Aminator, Spinnaker, Eureka, Archaius, Ribbon, Hystrix, Karyon, Governator, Fenzo, Photo, Dynomite, Atlas, Chaos Monkey and many others.
Why It Made the List: Puppet is an open source configuration management solution that is popular with many DevOps teams. Puppet is also the name of the company that offers commercial support for the software. More than 36,000 organizations use the software, including the Wikimedia Foundation, Reddit, Mozilla, Twitter, PayPal, Spotify, Red Hat, Intel, NASA, Uber and others. In addition to the flagship Puppet tool, the company contributes to more than 40 other open source projects that make up the Puppet ecosystem.
Android is based on the Linux kernel, and like that complex piece of code, most parts are open-source with a few binary blobs included to make things work with specific hardware. The core Android platform, known as the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), is available for anyone to do what they wish.
The same is true of the code that ships on Samsung, OnePlus, and other manufacturers' custom adaptations. Most of the apps you get on Google Play, regardless of whether they're free to download, aren't open-source. Since this software forms the bulk of what we see and use, the situation makes Android ultimately feel like a closed-source platform.
Many other well-known open-source projects typically seek more involvement from the broader community. Red Hat may fund a good portion of the work that goes into GNOME, but developers from all over the world contribute code.
Part of what attracts people to Linux and other open-source operating systems is the available freedom and control. You can't dive into the heart of a Windows or macOS machine and see what makes it tick. With Linux, you may not understand most of the code, but you're free to tinker with more or less all of it.
LineageOS isn't the only option out there either. Many have risen and fallen over the years, such as Paranoid Android and AOKP. In some ways, the custom ROM ecosystem resembles the Linux distribution model. These ROMs are mostly the same, but projects take the same code and tweak it in different ways. This wouldn't be possible if Android itself weren't open-source.
At the beginning of this post, we mentioned Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch as alternative open-source mobile operating systems. The thing is, the teams behind these projects have used Android code in one way or another. Sailfish OS lets you install Android apps directly despite not being based on Android.
My first ever contributions to the open-source community was during the yearly Hacktoberfest event in 2020. As a beginner I participated in beginner friendly projects which I will be sharing later to help you out too.
That does not mark the end! Now, just find more projects and keep contributing. Also be sure to be on the lookout for the one month dedicated to open-source contributions every year that's run by Digital Ocean for a chance to win some amazing gifts. 2ff7e9595c
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