Copyright and Copyleft
Copyright
What we call copyright is a set of laws meant to protect the rights of content creators and publishers.
- limit how a work can be copied, distributed, or displayed
- limit how a work can be adapted or modified
- limit how a work can be published or performed
In general, these acts are illegal without the express permission of the copyright holder.
The free software movement
The free software movement believes that software should be free in the sense of promoting freedom and liberty, not in the sense of price. It began in the 1980’s as a reaction to the increasing commercialization of software and the restrictions being placed on it that prevented others from using, sharing, and modifying software according to their own needs.
“Free as in Freedom, not free as in free beer”
- Richard Stallman
Copyleft
Copyleft is the mantra of the free software movement
- not a legal term
- simply a play on words
- copyleft is the opposite of copyright
- copyright is designed to prevent people from stealing, copying, and modifying each others works
- copyleft is the mantra that works are meant to be shared and modified
- this vision is often realized by using the GNU General Public License to copyright software
There are many so-called open source movements which focus more on free beer than on freedom.
GNU
The GNU Project is a collaborative group founded by Richard Stallman
- whose goal is to foster the spread of freedom (as differentiated from free in terms of price)
- began by developing the GNU free operating system, a clone of UNIX
- GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix”
- eventually this OS began to be called ‘Linux’ by ‘regular’ people after one of its parts
- according to GNU, the operating system is really called GNU, and Linux is the kernel used with that operating system
- eventually this OS began to be called ‘Linux’ by ‘regular’ people after one of its parts
- wrote the GNU General Public License, which has inspired a generation of open source developers to release projects under this or similar licenses
The concept of copyleft was described in Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto in 1985, where he wrote:
GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free.
GNU General Public License
- a legal licensing contract, written by Richard Stallman
- adopted by many open-source software makers
- allows anyone to modify the software any way they want
- so long as the derivative software is non-commercial
- guarantees that derivative works will always remain free
- GNU Lesser General Public License
- a slightly more lenient version of the GNU General Public License
- allows some commercial software to use the copyrighted work, so long as those programs are not derived from the work
There are now many spin-off licenses that maintain the basic ideas in the GNU General or Lesser Public Licenses, but differ in some details.
Open source
The open source movement is a less ideologically-driven splinter of the free software movement. It focuses on the practical and commercial benefits of releasing source code openly and freely, rather than on any philosophical benefits of freedom and liberty. One could say that the open source movement is more concerned with free, as in free beer.
Popular open source projects
The following is a short list of some popular open source projects. Some of these could also be considered free software.
Operating systems:
- Linux
- Android (based on Linux)
- Chromium OS
Programming:
- Processing programming language
- Node.js, a server-side Javascript engine
Product design:
Finance:
- Bitcoin, a decentralized crypto-currency.
Decentralized applications:
Networking:
- Filezilla file transfer application
- Apache web server
- NGINX web server
Web publishing:
- MediaWiki wiki platform that powers sites like Wikipedia (and this site)
- WordPress web publishing software
Music:
Media playing:
- VLC media player
Utilities:
Web browsing:
Science and Engineering:
- SciPy, an open source collection of tools in Python to assist math, science, and engineering
- OpenEEG electroencephalogram brain imaging hardware
Food:
- OpenCola beverage
… and many others …