August 2004
Beginner to intermediate
208 pages
8h 3m
English
Content preview from Understanding Open Source and Free Software LicensingBecome 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,
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The "Negative Effects" of Open Source and Free Software Licensing
Another effect of open source and free software licensing that has already been touched upon is the obstacle that violations of applicable licenses create for the violator of that license. Such violators will find that their own ability to enforce copyrights that arise out of or are related to infringements of the terms of an open source or free software license is seriously compromised. Violations of such licenses put the violators at risk of surrendering the benefits of any actual, copyrightable work that they may have invested in modifying or improving a licensed program.
Taking again one of the least restrictive examples of open source licenses as an example, it becomes apparent that violation of its terms undermines any future copyright enforcement relating to the modified work. The MIT License, described in Chapter 2, imposes the following restriction on licensees:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
This example is equally applicable to the other open source and free software licenses already described in this book, although, obviously, what constitutes such a violation of the license will vary.
Assume that XYZ Corporation develops software based on a program called Duchess, licensed under a license with terms identical to the MIT license. XYZ incorporates large amounts of the Duchess code into its own program, called ...
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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.
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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.