Software Copyrights and Licenses DANIEL PARKER

Overview  Copyrights  Software copyright information  Software licenses & some examples  Why copyrighting is important

Copyright Basics  Form of intellectual property  Creator of original work has exclusive rights to its use/distribution  Software not initially covered by copyright

Software Copyright  How is software covered by copyright?  Copyright law extends to machine-readable code  Prevents unauthorized copying/modification/distribution of software/source code  Fair use  Modification of source code for personal use is legal, as is reverse engineering in order to gain access to ideas and design

Software Licenses  Legal document that governs the use/redistribution/modification of software  Adobe General Terms of Use Adobe General Terms of Use  iTunes End User Agreement iTunes End User Agreement  Two types of software licenses  Proprietary, which does not grant access to licenses to modify source code, and open-source software, which does

Proprietary Software  Developed to perform specific tasks (one that developers don’t want changed), restricted use, source code not disclosed  Some proprietary software and their open-source counterparts:  Skype vs Linphone SkypeLinphone  Microsoft Outlook vs Thunderbird Microsoft OutlookThunderbird  Blackboard vs Moodle BlackboardMoodle

Open-source  Can be freely used, modified, and shared  GitHub is a great place to find open-source software that interest you GitHub  GNU is an OS that is open-source, can be freely used, modified, and shared GNU  OpenJDK is an open-source implementation of Java Standard Edition OpenJDKJava Standard Edition

Popular Open-source Licenses  Apache-2.0 (copyleft) Apache-2.0  GNU General Public License (copyleft) GNU General Public License  GNU LGPL (less strict than GNU GPL) GNU LGPL  MIT License (“true” open-source) MIT License

Resources  Resources exist to help understand proprietary and open-source software, and software copyrights  Copyright.gov Copyright.gov  Open-source InitiativeOpen-source Initiative  tl;dr Legal tl;dr Legal

Importance of Copyrights/Licenses  Very important for software developers because:  Gives developer security as to how they want their applications used (yes, even open-source licenses) Source:

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