Penguin
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Because software is Digital and therefore by nature very cheap to copy, when you purchase software you don't buy it (as in transfer of ownership); you license it, gaining the right to use it under a certain set of restrictions.

Books aren't licensed because when you buy the book, copying the book would cost you more than buying a new book, and up until the invention of the photocopier, bordered on impossible (you would have had to transcribe the book). There really aren't many restrictions on what you can do with a book. The standard "no part of this book may be retransmitted in any medium" is a CopyRight issue.

License is a verb; licence is a noun. However, Americans care not for this kind of distinction, so the text of all the licences you will read use the spelling "license", and as such that's what you'll find on our wiki.

Normal commercial software is licensed under some pretty restrictive terms; terms you wouldn't agree to buying any piece of property under. You used to get your license in the box you buy software in, but more commonly these days it's electronically. This is often in the form of an EndUserLicenseAgreement: the person who "bought" the software might not be the eventual user, and software companies wanted to close that loophole pretty quickly.

The GNU project turned licensing upside down by introducing CopyLeft; a license with different restrictions: the software was still licensed (it wasn't released to the PublicDomain), but with terms saying that if you gave someone the program you also had to give them the SourceCode for the program if they asked for it; and under the same license. That way you cannot take software released under a license like the GPL and take away the freedoms it affords you.

Software can also be DualLicensed, commonly released free under the GPL, and commercially under a second license.

See Category:License for a list of licences.


In the early days you did BUY software the same way you'd buy a book. You'd OWN that software outright, and have all the usual rights associated with ownership. The software author couldn't tell you what you were allowed to use the software for, or how long before it 'expired', or stop you letting friends use it when they came over, or stop you from selling it second-hand when you no longer needed it. Copyright still applied; you were not allowed to give or sell copies to your friends, but that was about all. Software Licensing was restricted to only a few very large and expensive programs which often had to be paid for a year at a time.

Microsoft's EULA means that you never own the software, you only have a licence granting restricted use of it under the terms set by Microsoft.

The GPL grants you permission to make copies of the software where such copying would normally be forbidden by copyright, but imposes some conditions on 'copying for redistribution'. The GPL does not impose any conditions on the end user. Once you obtain a copy of the software, you own it outright (you own that copy of the software, you still do not own the copyright on the software) and may do anything you like with it other than what is prohibited by copyright law. The GPL has no effect on your use of the software. You do not need a licence to use software that you own, just as you don't need a licence to read a book after you buy it. -- zcat(1)


From what I've seen, there's no dispute that licence is the correct terminology. A licence grants the licensee special permission to do something with the property of the licenser. eg, use their software in certain circumstances. The MS EULA might be more restrictive than the GPL, but that's neither here nor there. If you don't like the licence, you can of course use other software - I do. Incidentally, you don't own GPL'd code. The original authors of all code blocks maintain their ownership. And you don't 'need a licence to read a book after you buy it' because you've already paid the copyright fee and obtained permission. Read this article at groklaw. And, I'm sure, our next meeting will hold some insight-- DanielLawson


My understanding of the legal situation is based on that article and the GPL FAQ, although I have made some corrections to what I originally wrote here, and I'm assuming this will get covered at the next meeting. The GPL grants you a licence to make copies, you own everything but the copyright to it so the right to do anything else with the software (run it, modify it, etc) is assumed. Microsoft's EULA grants you permission to run software, and the software itself (the copy in your posession) remains the property of Microsoft. Microsoft's license is only a licence if it grants permission to do something you couldn't normally do.. in this case it grants you permission to use software you do not own.

Car analogies;

I buy a car from Toyota. Toyota still own the copyright (I can't make a knock-off Toyota clone) but I own the physical car outright. I can take it to any mechanic, change my own oil and sparkplugs, add after-market parts like a racing engine, spoiler and green neon lights. I can also take it apart and find out how everything works, sell it to someone else, turn it into funky modern art by impaling it on a large metal spike, or whatever else without having to go back to Toyota and ask their permission.

I buy a GPL car (from Richard, or from someone who used Richard's plans to build it) and I still own the car. I can do all the same things that I could do with the Toyota. Richard still owns the copyright, but he's granted a licence for anyone to build their own car using (or based in part on) his plans. The only restriction is that if you sell or give your car to someone else they get a copy of the plans and the same permission.

I go see Bill. He won't sell me the car but I can rent it for life for about the same amount of money. The physical car is parked in my garage, but I'm not allowed to take the car apart and find out how it works because it's not mine. I'm only allowed four passengers at most, and the next time I need an oil change Bill reserves the right to add GPS tracking and a remote engine dissabler if he decides that's necessary. Bill still owns both the copyright and the car itself.


There is nothing stopping car manufacturers doing the same thing. Except for the fact that cars wear down with age, so they don't gain a hell of a lot. Consider instead renting a house. You don't own the house - you only rent it. You can live in it. You can use it in certain ways, but you cannot knock walls out for example. You could buy a house instead. Outright, if you can afford the price, or you can get a mortgage on it. The mortgage will possibly even cost you only slightly more than the rental you were paying, but the difference is you're actually buying the house now.

Purchasing a 'copy' of Windows isn't really like either of these. You pay a one off cost for the life of the product, so it's not like rentals because you don't keep paying every term. It is closer to a rental however, in that you don't have the right to do absolutely whatever you want with the item, because the actual owner of the item has decided that you can't do this.

To go back to your analogy, leasing a car would be closer to the current situation for windows. You pay a certain amount to lease the car for a period of time, at the end of which you upgrade to a newer car, and pay a new lease sum. This seems almost exactly like what happens with most commercial software. You don't own it, so you can't have it modified - without the owners permission anyway. You can't onsell it - because you don't own it. You have conditions on what you can do with the car, such as the number of passengers and the speeds your allowed to drive it at, and the leasing firm handles maintenance - and the right to install alarms, gps tracking devices and remote engine disablers. It's their car, after all

As far as licences go, the GPL is actually exactly the same in this respect. It has restrictions on what you can and can't do with the software, and if you truly owned the software outright you wouldn't have those restrictions. If you owned it, you could mix it with your commercial code, or modify it and keep the changes to yourself. But you can't. The fact that the GPL offers you the freedom to knock down walls and renovate your house, to keep using that analogy, just means it's a more liberal form of licence. It's considered by some to be less liberal than the BSD licence, which incidentally still doesn't grant ownership to the end user. If you ever truly owned software, you could do anything at all that you wanted with it, including changing the license conditions.

''So the upshot of this is - if you want total and absolute freedom over your software, write it yourself. Or purchase it totally. But don't expect to buy the source code for an office suite for under a million dollars. And no, downloading the source code to abiword and gnumeric or OOo doesn't count. You still don't own the software. The fact is, basically all the software you 'own', you actually don't. You have permission to use, either by virtue of paying a fee to some nasty world-dominating megalithic corporation, or even to some other form of proprietary software selling company, if they exist; or by using OSS software. This is your choice.

Incidentally, none of this covers public domain software. I think the main difference here is that either noone, or everyone is considered to own the software, and there are no restrictions on its use.

-- DanielLawson