Recently, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Gina Likins from Red Hat at the 2015 Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges (CCSC): South Central conference about teaching open source.

Open source is…

Gina started by asking the audience how many people in the room teach open source? No one raised their hand! That means Gina had to start with the background of what open source is—and, she says it is like a cookie (yum). When you bake a cookie you can share the cookies and the recipe with your friends and family. If one of the people you share the recipe with is allergic to nuts and the recipe calls for nuts, then that person can alter the recipe. There is also the potential for people to take the recipe and improve upon it. Now, of course you can go to the store and buy cookies instead of make them, but you wouldn’t know for sure all of the ingredients of these store-bought cookies. And, it would be hard to replicate them. If you tried, you would run the risk of being sued for sharing proprietary cookies.

SOURCE: opensource.com