Software Licensing Resources

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Software Licensing Resources

One of your colleagues is an Erasmus student spending his second year in Sweden instead of here in Dundee. He is currently working on an essay about software licensing, which is the subject of your second tutorial so I thought that I would post some resources now that would give you a head start and will help out your Erasmus colleague a little. The basic premise is to explore Software licensing by comparing and contrasting a representative free software license like the GNU GLP against a proprietary software license like the MS EULA. To get you started you should use the following two links to get examples of actual licenses:

Now consider the following questions:

What is meant by the term free software in the context of the Free Software Foundation?
How is GNU/Linux licensed?
How does the GNU/Linux license differ from that of Windows XP?
What is Open Source software? How does Open Source software differ from free software?
What software is available under these different licenses?
How do software companies make money from free software?
What are the legal implications of developing, distributing, and using software which is licensed under either free, open or proprietary licenses?

Some secondary sources & polemic that might be useful in understanding the variety of communities involved and the legal issues that exist can be found here:

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Software Licensing Resources