Business Success with Open Source

Chapter 2Make the Intangible Profitable with Intellectual Property

As you learned in the last chapter, Stallman used existing copyright practices and laws to create copyleft and Free Software. This then directly led to the Open Source Definition, the Open Source Initiative, and open source software. Copyright still underpins it all, as does copyright’s bosom buddy licensing. In fact, the concept of licensing is so tightly entwined with FOSS that it’s often the first thing people consider when they think about free and open source software. It’s such an important concept that it gets its own chapter, Chapter 3, ​Licenses: The Rules of IP Engagement​, which will deep dive into the concept of licensing, the many different flavors of licenses, and ...