What's your favorite dish? Do you like pudding? My mum makes this delicious pudding that has chocolate chips in it. Every time I taste it, it has the right amount of sugar in it and the perfect amount of a very gingery flavor that makes a tickle on my tongue, always.

My mum tells me that this recipe was given to her by her grandma, and the original recipe didn't have chocolate chips in it and there was no cardamom either. Over the ages, as she acquired new tastes, she kept adding or subtracting things depending on her mood sometimes, sometimes mine. Isn't that a beautiful thing? Wouldn't it be amazing if you could cook a dish exactly like your mum did?

When you can look into how something was built and the source (or the recipe) is made available and can be modified and redistributed, it is called open source. If it is in the hardware domain, it is called open-source hardware, if it is in the software domain, it is called open-source software.

Without Arduino being open source, I would have never been able to learn or build. Open source has led to the formation of support communities for everything we do. If you google how to build a burglar alarm with Arduino, you will find a lot of links. On Arduino.cc, instructables, magazine links, blogs, it is this community that keeps the world on innovation fueled up. Did you know there are kids your age who are building satellites that would have taken them years to build without experts pouring their knowledge out in the open. Their designs, their code, their process is available for anyone to learn from and build upon. Open source software and hardware has saved lives by helping build medical devices that help in diagnosing diseases.

Personally, I share everything I work on with the community, to learn from the experts in the domain, to identify what could have I done better, to truly make a difference. I urge you to share what you do with people around you too.

While open source fuels innovation, patents (and other methods) help you keep it a secret. There is always a debate between the open-source communities and the communities that patent their work about who is right.

I would like you to know that there is no right or wrong here. Sometimes, people patent their work so that they could get a return (in terms of money or recognition) for the hard work they have put in coming up with a piece of technology or a method. That is totally fine. No one should be judged. You can get both of the aforementioned by open sourcing your projects too. Did you know Elon Musk (co-founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City), open sourced all his patents for the world to learn how to make the most efficient and fastest electric vehicles?

At the end of the day, remember this: if you want people to learn from your methods and mistakes, you can choose to share your work with them; if you want people to use what you have built but not know how you have built it, you can choose to keep it a secret.

Open source is to enable people like you and me make changes to the things we want, giving due credit to the original creator and sharing it further.