Open source software, on the other hand, is purposely designed with the idea that source code should be made available since collaborative effort of developers working to enhance the software can help make it more robust and secure. Proprietary software licenses often prohibit any attempt to discover or modify the source code. Typically, proprietary software vendors like Microsoft don't share source code with customers for two reasons: to protect intellectual property and to prevent the customer from making changes to source code in a way that might break the program or make it more vulnerable to attack. Microsoft only gives the customer access to the software's compiled executables and the associated library files that various executable files require to call program functions.īy comparison, when a user installs Apache OpenOffice, its open source software code can be downloaded and modified. When a user installs a software suite like Microsoft Office, for example, the source code is proprietary. Source code can be proprietary or open, and licensing agreements often reflect this distinction. In large program development environments, there are often management systems that help programmers separate and keep track of different states and levels of source code files. Programmers can use a text editor, a visual programming tool or an integrated development environment ( IDE) such as a software development kit ( SDK) to create source code. However, source code and object code do not apply to script (noncompiled or interpreted) program languages, like JavaScript, since there is only one form of the code. Source code and object code are sometimes referred to as the before and after versions of a compiled computer program.
It is designed to be human-readable and formatted in a way that developers and other users can understand.Īs an example, when a programmer types a sequence of C programming language statements into Windows Notepad and saves the sequence as a text file, the text file now contains source code. Source code is the fundamental component of a computer program that is created by a programmer, often written in the form of functions, descriptions, definitions, calls, methods and other operational statements.
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