Thursday, September 13, 2012

Open and Proprietary Lincenses

Reading up on some of the EULAs and Open Licenses I found some major differences between the two, the main one being the language used.  The open ones seemed to generally use more straight forward and easier to understand language where the proprietary ones used more technically legal jargon which could often be confusing and difficult to read and since I don't have a law degree or much legal knowledge a lot of the meaning eluded me and most of the time I had no idea what was being said at all.  Another big different that struck me was the difference in size.  It seemed that most of the open licenses were much shorter than the proprietary ones.

Out of all the legal documents I skimmed through trying to decode the hidden meaning of the strings of words strung together to apparently create a sentence I did find a few things that jumped out at me.  In the iTunes EULA there is a clause that explicitly states that this product can not be used in a Nuclear Facility, which seems like a very odd thing to state.  The statement does look as if its intended to be used as a disclaimer for all Apple products and it brings up the question as to why is this even here in the first place, or something along the lines of did something happen with an Apple software that required they add this clause.  Whatever reason it there for the fact remains that it is there.

The biggest thing that stood out to me from reading all of the licenses is that some of the Open Licenses allow the sale of the software.  I'm not sure if I read something wrong or didn't completely understand what was being said but it seems that any software using a MIT License can be used and sold by anybody provided that they include the License itself.  I understand if people modify the software and change it or incorporate it into a larger product and sell that but the problem I have with it is that any software licensed under the MIT License or a license like it can be renamed and sold by anyone.  It just struck me as odd that the licenses like MIT don't have some clause or something that protects the software from being sold like that, it disturbs me that someone can basically steal another person hard-work and make a profit by selling it without doing anything themselves.