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Open-sourcing

Open-sourcing is the act of processing source code of a proprietry product and preparing to release it as an open source application.

Several well known applications have been through this process including:

Netscape Navigator becoming Mozilla
StarOffice becoming OpenOffice.org

The task for large applications is not usually a simple case of slapping a LICENSE file in the distribution and releasing it. Most commercial applications will have a large amount of 3rd party licensed code that will need to be stripped out or permission obtained for its release.

Once the process has been completed the application can be described as open-sourced.

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

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