Public Access and Open Source Software

Copyright, by design, restricts what others may do with a work. But if others are allowed to use and build upon existing work, collaboration flourishes and new innovation follows in the same direction. Public licences exist to make exactly that possible — safely and legally.

Public licences

A licence provides the rules and guidelines under which others may use an existing work. When an author shares a copyrighted work under a public licence, others are allowed to use and even modify the content. Open source licences go further: they let people contribute to an existing work or project without seeking special individual permission each time.

Two popular categories of public licence are the GNU General Public License (GPL) and Creative Commons (CC).

Creative Commons (CC)

• Used for all kinds of creative works — websites, music, film, literature, and more.
• CC enables the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work.
• It is chosen when an author wants to give people the right to share, use and build upon a work the author has created.
• CC is in fact a set of copyright licences: they give recipients the rights to copy, modify and redistribute the creative material, while leaving the author free to decide the conditions of licensing.

GNU GPL

• Primarily designed for licensing software to the public.
• A free software licence: it gives end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software, besides receiving regular updates.
• Distributors of GPL-licensed works may charge a fee for copies or give them away free — the freedom is about rights over the software, not about price.
• GPL is the most widely used free software licence, and it carries a distinctive condition: the same rights must be preserved in all derivative works made from the software.

How GPL differs from other licence types

• Freeware licences (e.g. Skype, Adobe Acrobat Reader) allow copying for personal use but prohibit commercial distribution — and do not open the source.
• Proprietary licences prohibit copying altogether under copyright law.

FOSS — Free and Open Source Software

Much of the proprietary software we use is sold commercially, and its source code is not shared or distributed. In contrast, certain software is available freely and its source code is open for anyone to access, modify, correct and improve. This is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

FOSS thrives on its large community of users and developers, who continuously contribute new features and improve existing ones. Examples the book gives:

• Operating systems: Linux kernel-based systems such as Ubuntu and Fedora.
• Office package: LibreOffice.
• Browser: Mozilla Firefox.

Software piracy …