Skip to main content

COPYLEFT

 



Impact of choosing different forms of copyleft


Copyleft (the opposite of copyright) goes hand in hand with free software and open source licences. Basically, it impacts us secondarily when developing software derivatives.
We can classify it into two types of copyleft:

- Strong copyleft: the ideal copyleft for people who are only in the business of using the software, the end users. For developers, creators of software derivatives are bound by the rules imposed by the software licence itself, such as retaining the same licence as the original software and not being able to appropriate the derivative in its entirety. This makes it difficult to integrate these derivatives into different software, especially with proprietary softwares.
The most significant example for this type of copyleft would be the GNU GPL licence, created in 1989 and with its other versions that came later, with their own freedoms and rules within the strong copyleft.

- Weak copyleft: as the name indicates, it is a little freer than strong copyleft. You still have to retain the licence on the derivatives but there are "fewer licence rules", making it easier to integrate these derivatives with other softwares. Within this type are usually libraries used to create code for projects, in this case when the software is ready, the library will not show the licence under which it is created.
An example would be Mozilla Public license (MPL) which apart from being in this category, has proprietary elements inside.

Finally we could highlight the non-copyleft, which as you can already guess are completely free software, perfect for developers who want to create their own software without retentions having absolute freedom for its derivatives. On the other hand, it would negatively affect end users, who could be left without software due to lack of support.
One of the most significant examples of this category would be the apache licence where different projects such as Apache Web Server or VLC have been created. 

What kind of copyleft licence is ideal for the creation of a project? 
Well, it depends a lot on the final purposes of the developer himself. The one that gives you more freedom is the non-copyleft, being able to create derivatives and privatise it for yourself. But of course you don't have as many softwares to choose from as in weak and strong copyleft. It all depends on your project.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THREE INTERESTING IT SOLUTIONS

1980s: Machine Learning Do you know that today's massive algorithms probably know you better than you know of yourself? It all started with Alan Turin saying a famous and interesting phrase in the 1950s: Can machines think? That is when they started to investigate algorithms in which machines could learn by themselves from data. Until a few years later, when an IBM researcher named Arthur Lee Samuel created the first machine learning algorithm in the game of checkers and popularised it among IT researchers. For various reasons, there were about 25 years without any optimal algorithm results and the popularity of machine learning declined considerably, until the 1980s, when the backpropagation algorithm (neural network) was developed. From then on, different algorithms were developed and improved. Until today where machine learning is one of the most used fields collecting massive amounts of data and looking for patterns among them (without privacy) to improve the experience of each...
Post a Comment
Read more

TWO INTERESTING REPLACED AND OBSOLETED TECHNOLOGIES

  PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) The ancestor of the modern mobile phone, a personal digital assistant that offered limited access to many modern capabilities such as Internet access, word processing, touch screen functionality and more. They were very successful in the 1980s. They were programmed using a programming language called BASIC. The suppliers of these, some of them are known today, such as Casio and Acer. In 1995 the market for these grew even more thanks to the company Palm, Inc. They even put RAM and processors in these devices years later. After the 2000s, once smartphones became popular, PDAs quickly became obsolete, but before that time they were a favourite of business people all over the world. FAX (Facsimile) Also sometimes called telefax or telecopy, the humble machine was essentially a modern version of the telegrams. For many years, it allowed individuals and companies to transmit scanned documents. There were different types of transmission: - Cable transmi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cybersecurity in Spain

  Currently, 93% of Spanish citizens use the Internet. This is why new projects are already appearing in order to increase cybersecurity as much as possible. In Spain there are two institutions created for cybersecurity under the name of INCIBE-CERT and CCN-CERT. The first one is focused on companies and citizens and the second one only for the government.  I think it is worth making a separation before analysing security in Spain: before and after the appearance of COVID.  Before the pandemic there was not so much concern about cybersecurity, which has affected us in the state of inferiority that we are currently in compared to the UK or Germany. There were a few projects going on but at the official conferences, most of the companies did not attend, they had their minds set on their own company's profit or other reasons. But what's the point of getting wealth when they can take it away from you in hours through malware. The key to Spain's focus on internet security was ...
Post a Comment
Read more