The story of Linux began in 1991 when Linus Torvalds, who was a computer science student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, began writing a free operating system as a hobby! It is funny to realize now that his side hobby project became the world's biggest open-source project in history. Oh, and in case you haven't figured it out already, this free operating system was Linux. There are a lot of definitions out there on the web for open-source, and some of them are somewhat confusing for the inexperienced reader, so here is a simplified explanation:
An open-source project is a software project that has its source code made accessible for the public to view and edit.
The source code is simply the collection of code (programs) used to develop software; in the context of Linux, it refers to the programming code that built the Linux operating system. Now since you know what open-source means, it is easy to imagine what...