The World of Software Licenses

 This week in class, we discussed what goes into licensing a piece of software, along with copyright law. If I am being perfectly honest, this wasn't what I was expecting to study in this class, though it makes sense, in a way. Licensing, as I have learned, is a very important part of software development, and knowing who owns what, and defining who can do what with your code ties in pretty well to the other topics we've been discussing in class. As such, I've taken a look at an article from A List Apart, which is a blog that specializes in having many writers from the Computer Science industry comment on various issues and topics. I've chosen the article: "Considering Open Source Licenses", which talks about one of the things most interesting (and confusing) to me in terms of licensing, Open Source Licenses.

One would think that making software open source would be as simple as declaring it as such. However, in the real world, it's a little more complicated than that. What you really need to do is to attach a license to your software that describes what can be done with it, and there are several different licenses you can choose from, all with different requirements and specifications. Most of the licenses discussed in the article are, what else, open source licenses. All of them do functionally the same thing, allow people to use your software and edit it as they see fit. However, they all have slightly different specs that are important to keep in mind. The MIT license for instance, only requires you to keep the original license in tact, and attach a copyright notice to your project if it uses code that has the MIT license attached to it. GPL, on the other hand, requires you to document modifications made to the software, whether that be through traditional documentation or how-tos on how to use the software. The article also discussed in brief, some of the problems that occur if you were to violate a license, which isn't something that was discussed in class, and was something I found interesting.

The article makes it very clear that nothing covered is concrete legal advice, and of course, I am no lawyer either. That being said, licensing isn't nearly as difficult as I once thought, I was under the impression it was similar  to filing a patent, or some other legal document. I am happy to be wrong, in this case, and for any software I develop in the future, I will be sure to put some more though into licensing in the future!

(Side note: It has occurred to me that I am absolutely TERRIBLE at spelling the word license. I've spelled it so many different ways in the writing of this post it is almost comical. I also appreciate the fact that copyleft is a genuine term, since I was only familiar with copyright)

ARTICLE LINK: https://alistapart.com/article/considering-open-source-licenses/