Copyleft and Open Source

Copyleft
Copyleft, license granting general permission to copy and reproduce intellectual

property. Where copyright protects society’s interests in invention and creativity by
providing individual incentives through copyright control, copyleft protects social
interests in knowledge creation by vesting copyright control in a large general
community. The concept of copyleft is central to many programming projects, and the
license is most commonly used for software, digital art, writings, and other creative
content.
Copyleft is a specific license granted under copyright law, and the international
statutes governing copyright law are the mechanisms that establish and protect
copyleft. Typically, copyleft is a general license agreement granted by a copyright
owner permitting anyone to freely use copyrighted property but under specific terms.
For example, copylefted software allows users to run, modify, copy, and distribute
software on the condition that the source code remains open and publicly available.
Such software must usually be passed on with a copyleft license that requires
successive users to accept and transmit copyleft and mandates that any modifications
or improvements to the copylefted software be likewise transmitted under copyleft.
Copyleft itself probably began in the work of MIT computer expert Richard Stallman.
In 1983, Stallman started an open-source programming project called GNU (a
reflexive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix”) and created the first general public license
to govern the use of GNU, keeping it and its derivatives open and freely available.
Many consider the concept of copyleft to be a return to the earliest ideas
of intellectual property, which treat ideas and their specific forms as a common
heritage. Given that intellectual creations build on what has come before and shape
what comes next, copyleft is seen as a bridging mechanism to encourage the growth
of social knowledge and common good.
Copyleft, a play on the word "copyright," is the practice of offering users of a work
the right to freely distribute and modify the original work, but only under the
condition that the derivative works be licensed with the same rights. It is similar to the
"Share Alike" stipulation of the Creative Commons licenses (and the SA icon
resembles the copyleft icon).
Copyleft licenses are often found on software packages, but can be used on any work.
The GNU General Public License, originally written by Richard Stallman, was is first
and most prominent software copyleft license.
Licenses are permissions given by the copyright holder for their content. Licenses can
be applied to copyrighted material in order to give permission for certain uses of the
material. Copyright is still held by the creator in these cases, but the creator has
decided to allow others to use their work. Sometimes licenses are purchased and
sometimes they are given freely by the creator.
Licenses can be applied to allow reuse, redistribution, derivative works, and

commercial use.
Creative Commons is the most frequently used and accessible free licensing scheme,
but there are others that are used by certain communities. Licenses can also be applied
by commercial entities that own copyright to an item such as a journal article. These
licenses generally spell out limited usage for users and are available for a fee.
Copyleft licenses give each person who possesses the work the same rights as the
original author, including:
Freedom 0 – the freedom to use the work,

Freedom 1 – the freedom to study the work,
Freedom 2 – the freedom to copy and share the work with others,
Freedom 3 – the freedom to modify the work, and the freedom to distribute modified
and therefore derivative works.
In order for the work to be truly copyleft, the license also has to ensure that the author
of a derived work can only distribute such works under the same or equivalent
license.
Creative Commons licenses are applied by the copyright owner to their own works.
These are the most prominently used licenses of their type in the world. There are four
components to the licenses that are arranged in six configurations:
BY - attribution required.
NC - no commercial use.
ND - no derivative works.
SA - Share Alike - the license must be the same on any derivative works.
The ND and SA components cannot be combined, as SA only applies to derivative
works.
The six licenses (excluding CC-0 which is an equivalent to the Public Domain) are:
CC-BY
CC-BY-SA
CC-BY-ND
CC-BY-NC
CC-BY-NC-SA
CC-BY-NC-ND
The following chart illustrates the permissions allowed by each license.
Open source, social movement, begun by computer programmers, that rejects secrecy
and centralized control of creative work in favour of decentralization, transparency,
and unrestricted (“open”) sharing of information. Source refers to the human-readable
source code of computer programs, as opposed to the compiled computer
programming language instructions, or object code, that run on computers but cannot
be easily understood or modified by people.
In closed-source, or proprietary, software development, only the object code is

published; the source code is held secret in order to control customers and markets.
Open-source projects reject this practice and publish all their source code on
the Internet under licenses that allow free redistribution, which is why some consider
open source a kind of freeware. An important feature of open-source development is
that the resulting extensive peer review seems to do a better job of minimizing
computer bugs and computer security risks than the typical in-house process of
quality assurance at closed-source vendors.
Beyond computer software, the concept of open source has been used to create free
online databases and by commercial Internet vendors to populate reviews of items for
sale, such as books, music, and movies.

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Copyleft

Copyleft, license granting general permission to copy and reproduce intellectual

Licenses can be applied to allow reuse, redistribution, derivative works, and

Freedom 0 – the freedom to use the work,

In closed-source, or proprietary, software development, only the object code is

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