I got involved in a discussion about open-source software. A maintainer of an open-source project handed over the reins to another person and the other person changed the software to include a coin/mining exploit. This got me thinking about the double-edged sword of open source.

Where did open-source originate from?

A little history lesson about open-source projects. Open-source came to be in 1998 when it was developed after Netscape’s announcement that the software for the Navigator software was going to be publicly released. The term got more momentum during the Freeware Summit organized by Tim O’Reilly in April 1998. The highlight was when the Open Source Summit which is known as the birth of open-source.