Software Licensing
As defined on wikipedia.org,
A “software license (or “software license” in commonwealth usage) is a legal instrument (by way of contract law) governing the usage or redistribution of software. All software is copyright protected, irrespective of whether it is in the public domain. Contractual confidentiality is another way of protecting software. A typical software license grants an end-user permission to use one or more copies of software in ways where such a use would otherwise constitute copyright infringement of the software owner’s exclusive rights under copyright law.
The following are a few different kinds of software licensing terms that are commonly used. All of the information in this post has been extracted directly from Wikipedia and the content has not been modified. For the sake of keeping things clean & simple, however, Wikipedia’s internal links have been removed.
Proprietary Software:
The hallmark of proprietary software licenses is that the software publisher grants a license to use one or more copies of software, but that ownership of those copies remains with the software publisher (hence use of the term “proprietary”). One consequence of this feature of proprietary software licenses is that virtually all rights regarding the software are reserved by the software publisher. Only a very limited set of well-defined rights are conceded to the end-user. Therefore, it is typical of proprietary software license agreements to include many terms which specifically prohibit certain uses of the software, often including uses which would otherwise be allowed under copyright law.
One example of such a proprietary software license is the license for Microsoft Windows. As is usually the case with proprietary software licenses, this license contains an extensive list of activities which are restricted, such as: reverse engineering, simultaneous use of the software by multiple users, and publication of benchmarks or performance tests.
Free and Open Source Software
(also known as F/OSS, FOSS, or FLOSS)
Newcomers to the subject can be confused by the term “free”. In the context of free and open source software, “free” is intended to refer to the freedom to copy and re-use the software, rather than to the price of the software. The Free Software Foundation, an organization that advocates for free software, suggests that to understand the concept, one should “think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer”.
Free and open source software is an inclusive term which covers both free software and open source software which, despite describing similar development models, have differing cultures and philosophies. Free software focuses on the philosophical freedoms it gives to users while open source focuses on the perceived strengths of its peer-to-peer development model. FOSS is a term that can be used without particular bias towards either political approach.
Free Software:
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and that manufacturers of consumer-facing hardware allow user modifications to their hardware. Free software is generally available without charge, but can have a fee.
Open Source Software:
The term open-source software originated as part of a marketing campaign for Free Software. A report by Standish Group states that adoption of open-source software models has resulted in savings of about $60 billion per year to consumers.
Open-Source Software (OSS) is computer software that is available in source code form for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, and improve the software. Open source licenses often meet the requirements of the Open Source Definition. Some open source software is available within the public domain. Open source software is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open-source software is the most prominent example of open-source development and often compared to user-generated content.
