Summary

In this chapter, we covered a lot of ground. We looked at what it means to be open source by digging into how the OSI defines it as a common understanding that the source code should be accessible, open to change, and not limited by industry, among other things.

We found out about the major licenses that you'll come across on your journey and the differences between them. You saw that copyleft licenses such as GPL require you to share anything you create, but permissive licenses give you permission to keep those things for yourself, like MIT licenses do.

We then looked at the criteria that you can use to evaluate whether an open source tool might be for you by using things such as the number of GitHub stars, the number of maintainers, and how long it's been around. Looking at some of these things holistically lets us put together a better picture of whether we can count on our OSS tool to be maintained and reliable.

Finally, we saw how you can access the...