New to the sector, our intrepid reporter gets the goods on ‘open’ and ‘open source’ technologies for nonprofit fundraising. Did you even know there was a difference?

By Melissa Busch

Some examples
Quinn turns to Microsoft Word as an example. (Awesome — a computer term I know well.) She explains that you can’t one day be working in Microsoft Word and decide, “Hey, I think I’m going to move the print menu from the left side of the screen to the right.”

“There’s no flexibility there because it’s proprietary,” she says. “In open source, no one owns the code so anyone who is qualified can update the software.”