Intellectual Property & Software Agents in E-Commerce: Licensing & Open Source, Study notes of Computer Science

Download Intellectual Property & Software Agents in E-Commerce: Licensing & Open Source and more Study notes Computer Science in PDF only on Docsity! Software Agents and Electronic Commerce CS486-25 Intellectual Property #2 Chris Brooks Department of Computer Science University of San Francisco 25-0: Methods for Protecting and Distributing Digital Intellectual Property Once you’ve made an intellectual property, such as a program, you need to decide what to do with it. You need to decide the terms under which people can use your software. 25-3: Public Domain The simplest way to freely distribute your program is to put it into the public domain. No copyright is retained; users can do whatever they want with your program. This includes selling it or converting it into a proprietary product and copyrighting the derivative work. 25-4: Copyleft Copyleft is more restrictive than putting something in the public domain. Copyleft is an idea promoted by the GNU foundation Copyleft requires that anyone who redistributes software, either original or changed, must release this software under copyleft. Note that you can charge for this new software, but you can’t change the licensing terms. This provides developers with an incentive to delevlop free software 25-5: Copyleft Stallman: “If you will make your software free, you can use this code.” Example: The C++ front-end to gcc was developed in industry. GNU’s copyleft required it to be copylefted, since it used copylefted code. 25-8: Free Software It’s useful to think a bit about what “free software” really means. “Free as in speech, not as in beer.” In other words, you have the right to do what you want with it, not that you’re obligated to get it without paying. 25-9: Free Software GNU software freedoms: The freedom to run the program for any purpose The freedom to study the program and how it works (i.e. source code access) The freedom to redistribute copies The freedom to modify the program and redistribute the modified version 25-10: The Free Software Foundation Started by Richard Stallman in 1985 as a response to the overwhelmingly proprietary nature of software at the time. No free OSes (Unix was very expensive), few free tools. Goal: develop a free OS, along with a set of tools for that OS (editor, compiler, mail reader, etc) This system was referred to as GNU (Gnu’s not Unix) When the linux kernel was developed in the early 1990s, GNU finally had a free OS to run on. 25-13: Open Source License may not discriminate against groups of users. For example, countries may have export restrictions. An open source license may remind users to obey the law, but cannot explicitly incorporate these restrictions. Also cannot restrict use to, for example, only non-commercial entities Cannot require that it be distributed only with other open-source works. 25-14: Examples of Open Source software Mozilla Apache Perl, Python, all GNU tools PHP openSSH Much more ... 25-15: Economics of Open Source A common objection to open source is: “But I need to eat!” If your program is freely available, how can you make money from it? Maintenance/development: Most programmers spend a large fraction of their time maintaining tools or modifying them for a particular business. this won’t change if the underlying codebase is open source. 25-18: Open Source as a Business Model Market penetration. OS may allow a firm to add developments that would not be feasible otherwise. For example, ports to less popular operating systems. Remember, software has a “network effect” - getting a large user base makes it more valuable. 25-19: Open Source as a Business Model Potential Open-source business models: Support sellers (RedHat): Give away the product, sell support, after-sale service. Loss-leader. (Netscape, Java): You give away your software to help sales of related, closed software. 25-20: Open Source as a Business Model Product improvement. (SGI) A hardware company supports and ships open-source software (such as Samba) that improves their other products. Accessorizing. (O’Reilly, VA research) Selling systems or manuals that use or describe open-source systems. It’s not too different a consideration from the discussion on how to sell information goods when copying is prevalent.