Open and Closed Source Systems
June 6, 2013
Open and Closed Source Systems
POS/355
Option One
GNU Introduction The GNU General Public License has served a major role in the way people think of programs today. The GNU, or simply GPL is originally written by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The case is, most software’s don’t want you to share or change the program. This means that they are trying to take away freedoms of having the program. What the GNU General Public License is designed to do is the opposite of that because it offers freedom to share and change the software and to make sure it is free for all of its users.
This creation caused it to be the most widely used free software license. As of August 2007 the GPL accounted for nearly 65% of the 43,442 free software projects listed on Freshmeat. Some believe that the copyleft provided from the GPL was crucial to Linux’s Success because it gave programmers who contributed to the kernel the assurance that the work done by them would benefit the world and remain free. After the first version of the GPL, more were made that followed. The first GPL was made in 1989. After that, another version was made with similar licenses but there was concern over problems in the GPLv2 so they made another one in June 2007.
Preamble
The General Public License was designed so that it meant that the people won’t think of a free software as related to its price but more to freedom. What this means is that people can do almost anything to the program including, making copies, giving away copies, selling the program, and either turning the original program into something that is better. What this license includes in its preamble is; each distributer must know that there is no warranty for this free library.
With this license, comes great responsibilities for handling this. One example of this would be if you were tried to sell the program that you copied, you will have to tell them all their terms so they know their rights.
Open and Closed Source Systems
POS/355
Option One
GNU Introduction The GNU General Public License has served a major role in the way people think of programs today. The GNU, or simply GPL is originally written by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The case is, most software’s don’t want you to share or change the program. This means that they are trying to take away freedoms of having the program. What the GNU General Public License is designed to do is the opposite of that because it offers freedom to share and change the software and to make sure it is free for all of its users.
This creation caused it to be the most widely used free software license. As of August 2007 the GPL accounted for nearly 65% of the 43,442 free software projects listed on Freshmeat. Some believe that the copyleft provided from the GPL was crucial to Linux’s Success because it gave programmers who contributed to the kernel the assurance that the work done by them would benefit the world and remain free. After the first version of the GPL, more were made that followed. The first GPL was made in 1989. After that, another version was made with similar licenses but there was concern over problems in the GPLv2 so they made another one in June 2007.
Preamble
The General Public License was designed so that it meant that the people won’t think of a free software as related to its price but more to freedom. What this means is that people can do almost anything to the program including, making copies, giving away copies, selling the program, and either turning the original program into something that is better. What this license includes in its preamble is; each distributer must know that there is no warranty for this free library.
With this license, comes great responsibilities for handling this. One example of this would be if you were tried to sell the program that you copied, you will have to tell them all their terms so they know their rights.
References: Webkit, (June 1991) GNU Library General Public License, Retrieved From, http://www.webkit.org/coding/lgpl-license.html Stallings W. Operating Systems Internals and Design Principles