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Free and open, the way all software should be.

The free software philosophy has brought enormous amounts of good to the world. The team at Study Notes firmly believes this. That's why we release all our code as open source on GitHub.

While all the site content (notes, essays, etc.) are copyrighted to the respective content owners (mostly Study Notes, LLC.), the software which powers the site is available for free under a permissive license, for anyone to learn from and contribute to!

The spread of open source

Open source is everywhere today. The majority of servers on the Internet are powered by Apache (an open source web server) and Linux (an open source operating system). Most networks in large corporations are powered by Linux, and even 95% of the desktops and servers at major Hollywood movie studios like Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, and Sony run Linux.

Nearly everyone in the world directly benefits from open source software, whether they’ve heard of it or not.

The hacker spirit

"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech," not as in "free beer." — Richard Stallman

Here's a clip from an excellent documentary called Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age which has some great sound bites about why open/free software is so important:

The main guy in the interview is Richard Stallman, or "rms", as he likes to be called. He's a living legend in the computing field. He’s widely considered to be the father of the free software movement.

So, go check out the code on GitHub! :)

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