Introducing open Source Software from Getting Started with Linux
Introducing Open Source Software
Understanding the world of open software licensing is like taking a course in advanced property law, but where the critical concepts under debate are effectively the exact reverse of normal commercial law, being primarily concerned with the best way to give away as much property as possible, rather than protect it. If you’re going to work with free software like Linux, you should understand at least the basics of the rules that govern it. There are three main approaches to licensing; the Free Software Foundation founded in 1985 by Richard Stallman, the slightly younger Open Source Initiative, and Creative Commons. Stallman’s Free Software Foundation wants software to be free, not necessarily free of charge, but so that it allows users the freedom to do whatever they like with it. Some Free Software Foundation followers compare free software to beer. You may have to pay for it, but once it’s yours you can drink it, pour it over your barbeque, or simply leave it in the garage to go flat. The choice is yours. Stallman and his foundation are the authors of the GPL, the GNU General Public License, which allows users the right to do whatever they like with their software, including modifying it and selling it, as long as they don’t make any changes to the original license conditions. The Linux kernel is perhaps the most important piece of software released onto the GPL. The Open Source Initiative, on the other hand, while cooperating with the free software foundation where possible, believes that there should be more flexible licensing arrangements available if open source software is to achieve the greatest impact possible on the larger software market. Open source, by the way, means that the original programming code of a piece of software is made freely available to end users, along with the program itself. Licenses that more closely align with OSI goals, but include various versions of the Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD, which require little more than that redistributions display the original software’s copyright notice and disclaimer. This makes it easier for commercial projects to deploy their modified software under completely new license models without having to worry about breaking previous arrangements. To some degree, the FOSS and FLOSS designations may help to reflect the differences between these to visions. FOSS only implies that the software can be acquired free of charge, while FLOSS focuses on what you can do with the software once you acquire it. The Creative Commons license allows creators of just about anything, software, music, films, or books to choose exactly the rights they wish to reserve for themselves. Under the Creative Commons system a creator can select between any combination of five elements; attribution, which allows redistribution and modification as long as the creator attribution is included; share-alike, which requires the original license conditions to be included in all future distributions and copies; non-commercial, which permits only non-commercial use; no derivative works, allowing further redistribution, but only of unmodified copies; and public domain, which allows all possible use. It’s important when using software released under the Creative Commons to be aware of exactly which elements have been selected by the creator. The creative commons share-alike condition, along with Richard Stallman’s GPL are, in practical terms, related to the copy left distribution system. Copy left licenses permit full reuse and redistribution of a software package, but only when the original generous permissions are included in the next level distribution. This can be useful for authors who don’t want their software to ever evolve into closed license versions, but want its derivatives to remain free forever. Non-copy left open source licenses are often referred to as permissive. Permissive licenses will typically not require adherence to any parent restrictions. Examples of such licenses that often permit nearly any use of the license software, as long as the original work is attributed in derivatives, are the BSD, MIT, and Apache licenses. These days MIT and Apache are particularly widely used. Just because open source software is free, however you prefer to define the word, doesn’t mean that it has no place within the operations of for-profit companies. In fact, the products of many of today’s largest and most profitable organizations are built using open source software. In many cases, companies will freely release their software as open source while also providing premium service and support to paying customers.
by Unboxing Cloud
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