Do You Need a Software License?
- As a content producer: You have created a web page or a program and want to make sure that people use it the way you want them to.
- As a content user: You need a picture for your web site and are not sure where to find one that you are allowed to put online.
As a content producer, you can choose from an abundance of licenses. They even have names
that sound partially familiar: Eclipse Public License, Apache License,
BSD License, … But the licenses that are best explained for mere
mortals are the Creative Commons Licenses: The summary looks as follows:
A separate page
then explains what the icons mean. The site provides several ways of
including a license: as a button for web pages, as a text file for file
archives, etc. You can also choose your license in a wizard-style manner.
An important idea in software licensing is copyleft
(the reversed C icon above): You don't exert any copyright over your
work, but force derived work to do the same. The latter requirement has
led to Microsoft calling copyleft “viral” (a term that has since lost
its negative connotation).
So how about you wanting to use a picture? There, Creative Commons (CC) helps you, too: If you do an advanced search on Flickr, you can choose the CC license a picture should have. The same holds for the search options of Picasa Web Albums
(when the results are displayed). I usually link back to the picture
page underneath the picture or make the picture itself a hyperlink.
Wikipedia pictures also carry a CC license. Lastly, the CC site has a search page to search for liberally licensed content.
From http://2ality.blogspot.com/
Axel Rauschmayer is a research assistant at the computer science department of the University of Munich. His interests include software engineering, semantic web, and web development. His current project is the connected information manager Hyena: http://hypergraphs.de/ Axel is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 14 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website.
- Login or register to post comments
- 3443 reads
- Printer-friendly version
(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
Comments
Bernd Eckenfels replied on Mon, 2009/07/13 - 3:03pm
Axel Rauschmayer replied on Tue, 2009/07/14 - 3:22am
Do you mean software engineering related? I do consider the following things part of engineering software: adding a picture to documentation or adding a license when publishing an open source project.
Bernd Eckenfels replied on Fri, 2009/07/17 - 8:16am
haitam replied on Sat, 2009/07/18 - 8:02am