What is Open Source GIScience?
For a project to be open source its code must be publicly available under a liscence indicating that the code is free to use. The liscence may allow for the use of the code in any circumstance, or it may require that any products made using the open source code be open source themselves. Having an open source product enables users to understand the product at the basse level, empowering them to make modifications to the pproduct to suit their needs.
Free software, while similarly available to the larger public, is not necessarily open source. Even if the source code for a free product were available, the product may come with a liscence prohibiting modification, reproduction, or otherwise limit the legal use of the product.
This week I realized I had been coding already. Writing a case statement in QGIS is coding, and so is writing commands to organize an excel spreadsheet. Interacting with a computer is coding, only with a high level of abstraction. As QGIS is an open source project, I can investigate the exact processed that QGIS uses to operate, even knowing so little about the coding language the commands are formulated in. Being able to go down a few levels in abstraction would enables me to see what those underlying assumptiions are, and in the case of an open source project like QGIS, I could even change them to suit my needs.