How Open Source Ate Software: Understand the Open Source Movement and So Much More

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021

G. HaffHow Open Source Ate Softwarehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6800-1_3

3. What’s the Law?

Gordon Haff¹  

(1)

Lancaster, MA, USA

 

Turn the clock back to the late 1990s, and a common, if often self-interested, criticism of free software was that it subverted intellectual property (IP) law by giving away creative works. Even worse, it allowed others to profit from those works without any of that profit finding its way back to the original creator. Furthermore, it made it more difficult for companies and individuals who wrote and controlled the sale and distribution of their software in the traditional and proprietary way to profit from their creative endeavors. ...