there sales people or lab owners in your way. You are "free" to experiment. Finding open-source software for a desired function is as simple as doing an Internet search and down loading it from GitHub. Since the code is available to inspect, open source offers the ability to learn from the code-not only how it works but also gives an understanding of how one evolves it. This is a core concept that makes open source differentiated from proprietary code. Open source gives developers an opportunity to learn how others use and develop the software. Given the accessibility, especially through a social version control system like GitHub, of multiple options for any desired software function, it is also possible to differentiate between the various available software sources by further looking at the skillset of the people who developed it. Linus Torvalds developed the version control software called Git in 2005 to address shortcom- ings of the then-existing version control tools. It made remote offline operation much more workable with centralized repositories and most importantly, made branching, forking, and merging far less onerous. Git is free software, like the Linux kernel. When GitHub took Git and added the Web 2.0/ social aspects to it, the GitHub revolution took off. The combination of the virtues of Git and of social aspects have made GitHub the de facto place for a source code repository. GitHub made fork- ing fashionable-this is another step toward unimpeded progress. As software gets more and more complex, more help is needed to evolve it. Of course, with software, there is always an initial hump of effort required to make it reliable and functional to an acceptable base level. From there, depending on how extensible the software is and the scope of the software's functionality, the process of evolving it can go on for a long time. In the meantime, the base function should become increasingly more stable-especially, if the software is sufficiently modular and if one adheres to the UNIX dictum "do one thing