What does open source mean to me?

Open source to me means making source code accessible, leading to community, collaboration, and collective improvement. Considering I’ve been using Wikipedia for as long as I can remember, I feel strongly about the benefits of open source development, though the actual intricacies of it are still a mystery to me and something I hope to learn through this class.

Additionally, as a finance student, I’d love to learn more about how open source development is analyzed from a financial perspective. When do companies choose to use an open source business model, and what are the different routes they can take?

My experience with open source projects

Until writing this list, I had never realized that I used so many open source projects. Here are a few of my favorites:

• VS Code: My favorite IDE since high school (to be fair, I used jGRASP before, so it was pretty easy to beat).
• Wikimedia: As mentioned above, I’ve been using Wikipedia for as long as I can remember. While I’ve advanced past blindly trusting facts from Wikipedia, I now use it (and Fandom) to read plot summaries for TV show episodes when I’m too impatient to keep watching to find out what happens.
• Pandas DataReader: Used to access macroeconomic data from FRED and Fama–French industry portfolio returns for my final project in Data-Driven Investing with Python. We used the data to predict how industry-level factor exposures change across different macroeconomic environments.
• GitHub: Used for version control and collaboration. Not the most familiar yet, since I mainly started using it last semester in Operating Systems.