July 2008
Intermediate to advanced
384 pages
13h 6m
English
Content preview from Intellectual Property and Open SourceBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 10. Choosing a License
The following is a typical exchange from an Internet discussion about software licensing issues:
Person #1: I posted my code under the [license] license.
Person #2: You should have used the [LICENSE] license. It is the only license that is free.
Person #1: I chose the [license] because only [license] really is free!
Person #2: You chose wrong.
Person #1: You only think I chose wrong! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is never choose emacs over vi, but only slightly less well-known is this: never ever license your code under [LICENSE]! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha....
There have been many hours and pages dedicated to analyzing the difference between different software licenses. Software licensing can be a headache—one of the unfortunate costs that the intellectual property system imposes on society. Nevertheless, we spend the time because it is vital to get these issues handled correctly.
Why Do I Need a License?
Intellectual property (and copyright in particular, which covers source code) is oriented toward preventing use of copyrighted material. Speaking generally, if you don’t license your code, it can’t be used (legally) by other people.
More specifically, software licensing is about setting boundaries on what other people can do with your code. The complexity of licensing comes from defining and explaining those boundaries in legal, enforceable terms.
Licenses and Communities
The most ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.