Informatics Practices · Ch 6 — Societal Impacts
Public Access and Open Source Software
Public Access and Open Source Software
Copyright law, by default, restricts how others can use a creator's work. But if we want to encourage collaboration and build on each other's ideas, we need a way to share work legally. That is where public licenses come in. They are the legal rules that let authors share their copyrighted works with the world, allowing others to use, modify, and even improve them without needing individual permission each time.
Public Licenses: The Two Main Types
There are two major categories of public licenses you need to know: Creative Commons (CC) and GNU General Public License (GPL).
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Creative Commons (CC) is designed for all kinds of creative works — websites, music, films, literature, photographs, and more. It enables the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. The key idea is that the author decides the exact conditions of use. For example, an author might allow sharing but require attribution (giving credit), or allow modifications only for non-commercial purposes. CC gives the author the liberty to choose.
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GNU General Public License (GPL) is primarily designed for software. It is the most widely used free software license. Under GPL, end users get four essential freedoms: the freedom to run the software for any purpose, to study how it works (by accessing the source code), to share copies, and to modify the software and distribute those modified versions. A critical feature of GPL is that these same rights must be preserved in all derivative works — meaning if you modify a GPL-licensed program and distribute it, you must also license your version under GPL. This is called "copyleft."
Users or companies who distribute GPL-licensed works may charge a fee for the copies or give them away free of charge. This is a key difference from freeware (like Skype or Adobe Acrobat Reader), which allows copying for personal use but prohibits commercial distribution. It also differs from proprietary software, where copying is prohibited entirely by copyright law and the source code is kept secret.
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
When a software's license gives you both the freedom to use it and access to its source code, it is called Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The source code is open for anyone to access, modify, correct, and improve. FOSS has a large community of users and developers who continuously contribute new features and fix bugs.
Examples of FOSS:
- Operating systems: Linux kernel-based systems like Ubuntu and Fedora.
- Office packages: Libre Office.
- Web browsers: Mozilla Firefox.