Briefly describe the idea of open-source development.

Briefly describe the idea of open-source development.
Answer: Open source development is an approach to software development in which the source code of a software system is published and volunteers are invited to participate in the development process. Its roots are in the Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org), which advocates that source code should not be proprietary but rather should always be available for users to examine and modify as they wish. Open source software extended this idea by using the Internet to recruit a much larger population of volunteer developers. Many of them are also users of the code. In principle at least, any contributor to an open source project may report and fix bugs and propose new features and functionality. However, in practice, successful open source systems still rely on a core group of developers who control changes to the software.