The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed or stopped many things since 2020 began, but one thing that hasn’t been affected, at least in the negative, is open source. Tech Republic brought this interesting information to our attention in their article, “COVID-19 isn’t slowing open source—watch for developer burnout.”

Open source development remains resilient in the face of global upheaval due to the coronavirus pandemic, but unfortunately developers’ work-life balance may be the steep price.

Open source is a term that originally referred to open source software. Open source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify and distribute the code as they see fit.

Open source software is developed in a decentralized and collaborative way and relies on peer review and community production. It is frequently cheaper, more flexible, and has more longevity than its proprietary peers because it is developed by communities rather than a single author or company.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.