In: Operations Management
What is the difference between licenses and copyright? What is their importance? What do you think about using software that is not copyrighted?
Copyright denotes the consideration of the intellectual property rights of an individual or company. This means that software that is available has all its rights being held by the owner entity and its unauthorized use can lead to severe legal consequences. This includes copying the functionality or sharing the software. For eg. Norton Antivirus is copyrighted to their owners Symantec
Licensing is an agreement that grants a user the limited ownership of the software for their use. Depending on the type of agreement, the license can be based on a yearly, monthly, or lifetime subscription model. It does not however grant the user full ownership over the software. This means that while they can use it, they cannot copy, change, or reproduce the same in any capacity. Continuing the above example, we can say that the use of Norton antivirus is licensed to an individual, while the ownership stays with Symantec, the individual can make use of its functionality.
Software that is not copyrighted does not necessarily imply bad functionality, rather, the fact that the company or the individual wants their product to be used by everyone, without having to pay for a license. While some owners might accept donations, most software that follows this model is open source and their development is community-driven. This means that not only can individuals use them freely, in any capacity, but they can also take parts or functionality out of the product and can either build their own implementation or can add to the functionality of this product. I support the use of open-source software because it gives the community and developers the chance to create a competent product for free use by masses. It is empowering that such a level of collaboration exists and individuals are willing to share their hard work with the world.