Under its shared source program, Microsoft has permitted researchers, industry partners and governments to view and sometimes even modify the company's source code.
An emerging new paradigm is "cloud robotics," in which robots no longer have to be self-contained but instead are designed to tap vast global stores of information, parallel computing power, data sharing and open-source programming.
Open-source programs are typically distributed free.
Download some sample and open-source programs.
Most open source programs work as replacements for paid programs.
A willingness to share source code for a new program earned developers points with their campmates.
An increasing number of platforms where people can openly share information have been developing, such as GitHub, where you can share codes and other ideas for open source programming, and WikiHouse, an open source construction set which lets you build your own home from online templates.
In his last job, Mr. Stutz, 46, was a group program manager for Microsoft's "shared source" initiative -- a crucial effort at the company to deal with the threat from the open-source software movement partly by sharing more Microsoft code with universities and industry partners.
They also share the technical foundations of having been created by GlitchShort, an app Hertz made with open-source programming language Processing which relies on "interrupted pixel-sorting" to produce the effects you see here.
Theoretically, any user of an open-source program is free to create, adopt, or reject any alterations he pleases; in practice, software shared on networks or between users requires painstaking standardization.
Mr. Mundie said shared source combined the best of the open-source and proprietary software worlds.
