Understanding software copyright and licences

How do operating systems license their domains? What are the different types of software licences?

Does software have copyright? Even more specifically, is the Internet free inspite of software copyright? Are software programming languages free of cost? How does copyright apply to software?

A copyright gives a creator the legal right to own, distribute and profit from his or her creative work. Software, like any other technology has all shades of licences facilitating its use. On one end of the spectrum, there is proprietary software which is to be purchased as a one-time transaction or as yearly licences. A popular example is Microsoft Windows which is purchased along with the computer or Microsoft Office which typically has a yearly licence that has to be renewed upon payment.

On the other hand, there are different kinds of software licences that allow free use of software. There is the Creative Commons licence (CC) which is public domain: any software or work that is in CC can be used and distributed free of cost. For example, Wikipedia is under CC and hence its contents can be used freely with the condition that attribution is made to Wikipedia (this is called ‘Creative Commons – Attribution-ShareAlike).

Another form of free software licence is Permissive Software licence which is popular in the software developer community and in the commercial world. This licence allows free use and modification of software. There are further specific licences under this category, like the Apache licence and MIT licence. The Apache licence is maintained by the Apache Software Foundation which is a non-profit entity. Many popular and powerful softwares like Spark (used in Big Data) have been developed under Apache licence. MIT licence is maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and it covers hundreds of software packages including GitLab and Dot NET.

All free and permissive software licences are similar to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), a set of rules and free software brought under one umbrella in the 1980s by Richard Stallman, a famous computer scientist and activist. FOSS maintains its own licence, called GNU GPL (Gnu’s Not Unix General Public Licence) to govern and distribute free software but it comes with restrictions that its adoption and modification be for free use.

In the software community, ‘open source’ means any of the above non-proprietary licences. Open source software packages are developed and maintained by programmers from around the world. Until the mid-1990s, the idea of the general public collaborating to create software for free seemed to be unrealistic and confined to small, elite communities. However, with the success of a free operating system like Linux (which is under GNU GPL licence), many were convinced that open source could create sophisticated solutions because of access to top programmers around the world.

Proprietary software also has its own place. Many software companies release certain generic portions of their software under open software licences but keep the critically important ones under proprietary licence. Companies like Google and Meta (Facebook) have made significant open source contributions to software packages on artificial neural networks and machine learning, after a few years of using them within their organisation and perfecting them.