A practice presentation took place today on Friday evening. It was bloody awful. Nevertheless, I received necessary points and this part of the course is clear now. The subject of the presentation was “Software and Internet Licenses”. The purpose was to give an informal introduction to the subject of Licenses. I took only a few moments.
The definition of License is a meaning to give certain official permission, allow or deny something according to its described conditions. The purpose of License is authorized usage. When License is present, its subject is known exactly what it is bounded to and how it can be used further.
I began by dividing a picture of Software and Internet Licenses into two flavors:
- Licenses for software (or source code). It usually can be found when some software is downloaded and just started to use. Usually it is a standalone software or a software connected with other software facilities. The representative License is GNU General Public License (GPL).
- Licenses for internet facilities (or websites). Such Licenses are typically encountered when certain websites are visited. This Licenses usually are applied to the content of a website. It can be some images, video, audio, texts and so on. The representative Licenses are Creative Commons (CC) licenses.
When some man has Intellectual property, he needs to regulate its usage. The most important is that this man must not violate others’ property in his claimed intellectual property. As long as others’ property is respected, this man chooses the License that suits his needs. That were the general picture for types of Licenses and reasons for.
Then I looked at accordance to License. I supposed that some intellectual property is owned. It can be foreign property what man didn’t make or the property is made by man himself.
- If man uses foreign property, so its terms of License regulate his usage and they are obeyed by him.
- If man uses own property, he has his rights reserved. Typically, the signature like “All rights reserved” means rights by default, if there is no agreement the other way.
Consequently, this property is used and further distributed by people. As a result owner needs to regulate its relationship with an audience. Foreign property may restrict its further use. Own property is available under principles an owner wants. He can put an arbitrary statement that reserves his rights, but also he can choose a ready-made License to represent his property.
Finally, I turned to common traits of Licenses. There were four traits I considered to mention.
- License can assume that its subject is a free software. Hence, it gives certain benefits for free to use, study, modify, copy and redistribute.
- License can have some full or partial copyleft. Perhaps, License grants that exactly the same freedom must be granted in any derived work. This is full copyleft. License may also exempt some freedom as opposite to full copyleft. In this case it permits distribution of any derived work under freedom other than it was before.
- License can be approved, recognized or released by related organizations. For an example, if it is known that a license is recognized by Open Source Initiative (OSI) or Free Software Foundation (FSF), we are certain about attributes the License has.
- License may be compatible with other License for combination, further modification or distribution. If there is a contradiction then their properties cannot be combined for further usage.
That completed my brief overview of Software and Internet Licenses’ presentation. Thank you for your attention.
Used materials:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property
- http://www.fsf.org/ Free Software Foundation
- http://www.opensource.org/ Open Source Initiative
- http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/
- http://www.gnu.org/licenses/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
Tags: Licenses