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.

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Reflections

Finally done my exams and looking back at the semester.  Overall it's been pretty different, since most of the work has been done in groups rather than individually.  OOP344 has been quite a different experience, although it was enjoyable.  It was nice to not have to do all the work of an assignment alone, having it split up in to small parts made in manageable.  One of the weirdest things was the fact that my group never even saw each other and hardly communicated.  But I'm lucky I had a good group where everyone was willing to do work and get in it on time, although we didn't have good time management skills since we usually started our work a day or two before it was due.  But looking at the amount of other groups that changed during the semester it seems that our group was well off compared to the rest.  It was nice only worrying about a small part and only worrying about the rest of the work when group members needed help.  All together although this semester was different, and weird, I enjoyed it.