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Typically, English writers do not hyphenate open source or closed source when referring to computer software.

Why is this?

Should they be hyphenated or is it best to not use hyphens for these terms?

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My understanding is that you only hyphenate two words when you want to make a new single compound word out of them. So, "open source" is a phrase and "open-source" is a word.

Using the compound word can make a sentence more clearer, eg

"Can you give me the open source software standards"

risks being parsed as "Can you give me the source software standards that are open". Saying "Can you give me the open-source software standards" is less likely to confuse.

Wikipedia refers to it as "open-source software" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software), which you could take as evidence for the hyphenated version being "correct". In practise there is often no officially correct version in cases like this: one version just ends up being the de facto convention. It's part of the evolution of new words.

So, someone who doesn't use the hyphen isn't "wrong", but you can still choose to use the hyphen yourself and this might be preferable.

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  • You should look up the accepted usage/s in dictionaries and style guides, especially ones focusing on the computing domain. There has been a lot of discussion of open, hyphenated, and solid compounds, and also of the phrase-or-compound debate, in previous threads.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 19:47

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