Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing

Open Source Software Licensing

In part as a reaction to this distributor-driven model of copyright licensing, programmers developed what is now known popularly as "Open Source" licensing. The development of this manner of software development and licensing has been described well elsewhere and will not be repeated here. For more details on the history, read Free As In Freedom (Sam Williams, O'Reilly 2002), The Cathedral & The Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond, O'Reilly 2001), and Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (DiBona et al., O'Reilly, 1999).

The fundamental purpose of open source licensing is to deny anybody the right to exclusively exploit a work. Typically, in order to permit their works to reach a broad audience, and, incidentally, to make some sort of living from making works, creators are required to surrender all, or substantially all, of the rights granted by copyright to those entities that are capable of distributing and thereby exploiting that work.

Because these entities, by their very nature, do not see work as work in the first instance, but rather as the source of an income stream flowing from its exploitation, they are jealous of their right to exclusive exploitation of the work. They are similarly reluctant to share any part of the value of the work with others. While the potential consumers of a literary or musical work will be limited by the costs of acquiring the work—costs that are set exclusively by the person or entity that controls the right to ...