%0 Journal Article %J IEEE Software %D 2004 %T The many meanings of open source %A Gacek, C. %A Arief, B. %K classification %K projects %K taxonomy %X The term Open Source is widely applied to describe some software development methodologies. This paper does not provide a judgment on the open source approach, but exposes the fact that simply stating that a project is open source does not provide a precise description of the approach used to support the project. By taking a multi- disciplinary point of view, we propose a collection of characteristics that are common, as well as some that vary among open source projects. The set of open source characteristics we found can be used as a tick-list both for analysing and for setting up open source projects. Our tick-list also provides a starting point for understanding the many meanings of the term open source. %B IEEE Software %V 21 %P 34 - 40 %8 01/2004 %N 1 %! IEEE Softw. %R 10.1109/MS.2004.1259206 %> https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/gacek.pdf