Open Source

[Deleted member 49125]

On some other forums, I’ve been reading about the term Open Source. From what I gathered on several forums is that there is no customer service. Only peers helping each other out.
I’m curious why a company would choose to have their produce be Open Source. When I have questions, I like asking directly then I can get the (hopefully) right answer.
I’m in Proboards & we do have a Support so I’m assuming Proboards is NOT Open Source.
Is this correct?

 

[Deathstarr]

Open Source means you can take the code and modify it and re-distro it. Like PHPBB and Icy Phoenix, SMF and MyBB are also open source. You can. Github is full of open source code you can use to make your own application. Many use open source as a way to spread their code for free vs paid. One of the best open source software is Wordpress you can take it, modify the way it works and call it your own, Matt released it for free and open source and I have never seen a paid blogging system even come close to it, in terms or use and backing from community.

 

[Deleted member 49125]

Open Source means you can take the code and modify it and re-distro it. Like PHPBB and Icy Phoenix, SMF and MyBB are also open source. You can. Github is full of open source code you can use to make your own application. Many use open source as a way to spread their code for free vs paid. One of the best open source software is Wordpress you can take it, modify the way it works and call it your own, Matt released it for free and open source and I have never seen a paid blogging system even come close to it, in terms or use and backing from community.

Thank you for this! I will keep this as reference 🙂

 

[Nomad]

The appropriate answer has already been given, therefore, I would like to add something else to the discussion. There is a slight difference between open source and free. Open source means the program can be modified by anyone, where as free means it is free to use. proboard is free to use, phpBB is open source. Xenforo is premium software, you cannot edit the source code, you cannot use oit for free.