Penguin
Note: You are viewing an old revision of this page. View the current version.

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.


This entire page is crap. 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 is a contract, not a licence. It restricts what you'd normally be allowed to do if you owned the software, and you have to accept it because that's the only way you can legally get hold of the software. Effectively you never own the software, you only have restricted use of it under the terms set by Microsoft. Microsoft does not grant a licence (permission to make copies that would normally be forbidden by copyright) to any end user.

The GPL is a licence. It 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' (and nothing else). Once you obtain a copy of the software you own it outright 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've read 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