The only references to software source code that I found in TomTom’s prospectus related to a discussion about copyright protection of source code (as opposed to “object” code, not open source code). I searched via a .pdf “find” and admit that even after apparently illegally obtaining the TomTom prospectus, I did not read it.

I’m excited today to announce that we are also releasing the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license. The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code. You can read the text of the MS-PL at: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html

It was unfortunately reported yesterday by a number of sources that Amazon had released the source code for the software running on the Kindle DX.
This isn’t all of the Kindle source code. It’s a selection released in order to comply with the license requirements of the code originally written by other people (like the GNU Project) which Amazon modified for its own purposes.

Open-source software is software for which the source code is freely and publicly available. Although open-source software is also called "free software" (see www.fsf.org and www.opensource.org), it is far from free. There are specific licensing agreements that are applicable to such code, which specify the responsibilities of the user of the code.

Open source is great. Code is knowledge and knowledge should not be hidden forever. ASAP it should become public for all to use and benefit from. In the past the flow of information was slow, but nowadays is fast, and the faster we share and need information, the greater the need society has for all code, which is knowledge, to become public, with no strings attached.

In three years, Krugle, the company behind the code search engine of the same name, has gone from an idea to a company that's starting to produce revenue. CEO Steve Larsen, a veteran of half a dozen startups, attributes this brief time to market as being due largely to free and open source software (FOSS). According to Larsen, FOSS has shaped most aspects of the company, including its hiring practices and relations with business partners and users.

Contrary to what you may have heard, free and open source software (FOSS) is not anti-business. But neither is it pro-business. More accurately, FOSS is focused on concerns outside of traditional business, such as user freedom and code quality. For this reason, making the two work together successfully requires special efforts and resources, as well as careful study of the various options.

Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things. To make these acts possible, the human readable form of the program (called the source code) must be made available. The source code may be either accompanied by a software license saying that the copyright holder permits these acts (a free software licence), or be released into public domain, so that these rights automatically hold.

A compiler is software that transforms source code written in a computer language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language, often having a binary form known as object code).