The blog I chose to write about today will be on copyright and licensing in software with that being one of the main topics in the course and to get a better understanding on licensing. In the blog “What is a software license?” by the website Synk.io, provides an in depth blog on types of software licenses, how it works, uses, as well as management of them. The blog mentions how software that is not covered by a license is categorized as “public domain software” or “private unlicensed software”. In the example Professor Wurst mentioned in class previously about wanting to implement a software in the course which had no license falls into private unlicensed software. The software although unlicensed still falls under copyright protection thus unusable for others. The blog mentions examples of when common users would see software license agreements. These are often listed in the terms of conditions prior to installing any software under a end-user license agreement (EULA).
The graphic above displays the 5 different kinds of licenses and shows the level of restrictiveness depicted by the arrow going from less restrictive to most restrictive. The article further goes in depth for each of the 5 license types software.
The article describes how software that use Public Domain Licenses typically run into the issue where the code might not follow the best procedures and standards. Which is a consequence of the nature of the license. I can see a lot of educational software or software for non profit being released under a public domain license.
The next license that the article talks about is LGPL and how “developers have rights to link open source libraries within their software”. In other words, LGPL lets you add licenses to code without completely releasing the entire source code.
Permissive licenses are what we have researched the most in class which ranged from Apache to MIT licenses that often require copy right notes within the software.
Interestingly when the article talks about Copyleft licenses it mentions how it probably is not the best license for software developers due to the reciprocal licensing of resulting code in other words, all derived code has to follow the same copyleft licensing. With that being said, copyleft licenses are probably best used for research/educational purposes or for very transparent community collaborations.
Lastly, the most restrictive licensing type proprietary are often used by large corporations and protects the owners/developers from unauthorized use. When doing further research for applications that use Proprietary licensing I found that the application Skype a proprietary license thus the source code is not provided publicly and is owned by Microsoft.
Overall, when reflecting at the different types of licensing and my personal goals. I see myself in the future using a permissive license like the MIT license for straightforwardness and simplicity. To add to that, currently for our program on Markdown to HTML my group is using a MIT license for those reasons.
Anthony Duong CS Blog 