Introduction to Open Source

[MUSIC] 0:00 Now that you're comfortable with GitHub let's start giving back to 0:04 the open source community. 0:07 GitHub hosts millions of open source projects. 0:09 What is open source software? 0:12 Open source software is software that is modifiable and 0:13 enhanceable by anyone because the software's license allows it. 0:17 This code is publicly viewable on GitHub and 0:21 doesn't require private access to view the code. 0:24 You've probably already used some open source software. 0:27 Actually, I can almost guarantee you have. 0:30 Git, the version control system we've been using as a part of this course 0:32 is open source. 0:36 If you've written software using Ruby, PHP, or 0:38 Python you've also used open source software. 0:40 These software projects publicly share their code with the world and 0:44 rely on their communities. 0:47 People who use the software to contribute back to the project. 0:49 You also created a few open source projects at the beginning of this course. 0:53 When we created those public repositories 0:57 we were sharing that simple code with the world. 1:00 An important part of open source though is adding a license. 1:03 A license is a text file that tells the world how they can 1:07 use the code we've written. 1:10 Lets go back to our first project now and add a license. 1:12 Click on the repository you created in stage two named Treehouse. 1:16 My repository is a little empty because I'm trying to show you something new. 1:21 Your repository will have the Python project you added with Allison. 1:26 Now, let's click the new file button halfway down the page. 1:30 This will allow us to create a new file. 1:35 We'll call this file license. 1:37 License is the standard name for the file that holds your projects license. 1:40 By using the license name here GitHub can help us by providing prefilled license 1:45 templates. 1:49 On the right side you should now see the ability to choose a license. 1:51 This will show a variety of licenses that GitHub can provide out of the box. 1:55 Of course you can always use your own by just adding it to the repository. 1:59 For this project let's choose the MIT license in the drop down. 2:03 There it is. 2:07 GitHub prefilled the files contents with the MIT license. 2:08 Now all we need to do is commit the license. 2:12 We'll scroll down to the bottom of the page, and we'll just use the prefilled 2:14 message that GitHub already added, and commit this to the master branch. 2:18 Let's just click commit new file. 2:23 That's it. 2:26 Here's our new license. 2:27 Now anyone who comes across your open source 2:31 project will know that they can use it, modify it, and redistribute it. 2:33 Not every license is so permissive though. 2:38 You could read more about different types of licenses in the teacher notes. 2:40 There are a ton of open source projects that can use the help 2:44 of a Treehouse student like you. 2:47 In our next video we'll show you how to find a great open source project 2:49 that you can contribute to. 2:53