ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Open source software

Okay, imagine that you and your friends are building a sandcastle. You all work together to create the best and most impressive sandcastle you can. When you work together, you can do more than you might be able to do by yourself, and you can also learn from each other and make your castle better.

Now, imagine that you want to make a really cool sandcastle, but you don't have any friends to help you! You could still build a sandcastle by yourself, but it might not be as impressive as if you had some help.

Open source software is like building a big sandcastle with friends you've never met.

Instead of building a sandcastle, people work together to create computer programs, like games, apps, and tools that help people do things like write documents or edit photos.

Open source means that the people building the software are sharing the code they use to make their program work. This means that anyone who wants to can look at the code and make changes to it, just like you and your friends might make changes to your sandcastle as you build it.

This can be really helpful because sometimes people have big ideas for software, but they might not have all the skills needed to make it work perfectly. So, people who are good at one thing, like programming, can help people who are good at something else, like design, and they can all work together to make something really cool.

Overall, open source software is a way for people to work together to make awesome computer programs, just like you and your friends work together to make awesome sandcastles.