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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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open standards. The terms are related to closed source, but don’t confuse

them; they aren’t interchangeable. These labels often imply that the product

may not play nice (or be interoperable) with other products, may have

connectors and cables that are hard to find or expensive, may not be friendly

to users who want to tinker with or modify it, may be harder to repair, and

may pose a host of other problems.

The concept behind and use of these terms is sometimes slippery. As

you’ll see later in the chapter, a device maker may use a common standard

such as USB 3.0, but design its own connector. Even though the device

maker is technically using part of the open USB 3.0 standard, we’ll still call

the device’s ports and cables proprietary.

Open Source

In this broader sense, you can think of a product as open source if its maker

releases the instructions for making it—it doesn’t have to be software (though

that’s usually the context). When a company commits to open sourcing one

or more products, it has to operate differently than companies using a closedsource

model. Secrecy, for example, is necessarily a smaller part of its

business; knowing that anyone could make its products, the company has to

focus on other factors (such as price, service, support, convenience, quality,

innovation, etc.) to stay competitive.

Just because a company releases these instructions to the public doesn’t

mean anyone else gets to own them. Much as artists and authors set terms

that specify whether the rest of us can legally copy or modify their work, the

owners or authors of the instructions for making a product will specify terms

for how others are allowed to use them. Sometimes the owners or authors

may just say they’re releasing the instructions for personal use or educational

purposes—you can study what they’ve done and make your own product, but

you can’t start selling copies. When it comes to open-source software, these

terms commonly dictate whether companies who modify the software are

obliged to publish their changes, and whether they’re allowed to profit from

how they use it.

Development Models and the Mobile OS

The development model is one of many choices that reflect underlying

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