I typically se a lot of apps or websites day they are open source. I have wondered what stops someone from using the code from creating a competitor to the original? Are there different levels to open source? By this I mean do they only allow a specific amount of code to be looked at and if so, how do they delegate who sees what?
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In true open source (freeware) … Nothing stops you from doing that… That’s the principle behind it.. some of them restrict commercial use trough creative Commons license
Mostly there just isn’t a point in doing so. Someone’s already taken the time to build the thing, why invest the effort in pretending you built it instead? Especially when it’s all public record and anyone who cared could verify that someone else built it originally.
Nothing stops people from copying and using open source software, except the law and the prospect of being sued.
Open source is a different concept than “free to use.”
You may have heard the term “free *and* open source” (FOSS).
Open source software simply means that whoever owns the code makes it available for others to see.
However, someone cannot legally copy and use software unless the software license grants permission to do so.
FOSS is open source software whose license permits anyone to reuse the code, often with some restrictions (e.g. must credit the author, must identify which code was used, etc.)
Software licensing can be complex. But that’s the short answer.
Every open source project has a license agreement associated with it. One big thing the license states is what someone is legally allowed to do with the software. Depending on the terms, someone could literally take and resell the software. Others are more restrictive and only allow non-commercial uses.
The [MIT License](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License) is one of the most permissive. It generally lets anyone do whatever they want with the open source software including building a derivative and selling it without paying the original writer.
The [GPL license](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License) is more restrictive. It requires any derivative work to also be open sourced and puts some restrictions on how derived software can be sold.
> I have wondered what stops someone from using the code from creating a competitor to the original?
The license. Some licenses explicitly block it. If a company violates it, they will lose a lot in court. You as a consumer generally ignores the license agreement because 99.9% of the time it doesn’t matter. But for a company? They literally invest in an army of lawyers to make sure they don’t violate these terms because it’s easy to get found out and they can lose a lot if they willingly violate it.
> Are there different levels to open source?
Android is a perfect example. Google owns the project and Android itself is completely open source. Others can and have built derivatives of Android that directly compete with Google’s Android. Amazon with their Fire devices is an example. Google splits Android into 2 parts. The open source core which is derived from Linux. Then there are parts of Android that are Google proprietary that integrate with Google services. Things like the Play store and payment services are part of that. Companies that use those services need to pay Google a licensing fee. Amazon doesn’t pay Google a licensing fee because they developed their own replacement components with the same Android core. This is also what hamstrung Huawei phones when they were sanctioned by the US. They lost the ability to use Google services including the Google Play store and had to basically develop replacement services.
Nope, there are no protections. Open-source code really is free for anyone to look at, and for the most part it’s free to copy and reuse as long as you follow the license terms.
Why would someone open-source code that they wrote?
* Sometimes just to be generous
* Sometimes because they made it just for fun
* Sometimes because they’re going to make more money selling services than selling the software directly. People pay them (1) for using a hosted version of the software, or (2) to customize / modify the software, at an hourly rate
* Sometimes because it’s more important for everyone to have the software, than to make money from it. Google open-sourced Chromium because they wanted everyone to have a better browser, because they make money from people using the web. Better to have a bunch of Chromium-based browsers competing than to have everyone using Internet Explorer.
* Sometimes because the company needs the software, but doesn’t make money from it at all! Some projects like Kafka or Cassandra, are basically “tools” used by companies to run their business. They get more benefit from others helping to build that software than from hoarding it.
* Sometimes they didn’t want to open-source the code, but the fastest way to build something was to use existing open-source code and modify it, and now they’re required by the license to open-source their own improvements.
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