#Week 6. IMPACT OF COPYLEFT CHOOSING A SOFTWARE LICENSE - EXAMPLES FOR EACH CATEGORY

Firstly I think it is important to point out what is copyleft and why it came out. It appeared as a response to the use of a public domain version of a Lisp interpreter, which is later used by other interest part and improved to serve a particular purpose and then becoming proprietary software for the only interest of the late part involved. 

The original creator of this interpreter was Richard Stallman and he was refused the right to access to the new version of the Lisp interpreter he had created. As a pragmatic person, instead of fighting against the copyright laws, he decided to put his efforts to use it in his own benefits, so he pioneered the use of copyleft by creating his own copyright license, the Emacs General Public License, the first copyleft license. This later evolved into the GNU General Public License, which is now one of the most popular free-software licenses. 

The copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, which doesn’t mean “gratis” (Spanish term used by GNU to describe it), and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. 

A good example to bring some light to the matter is giving the following one:
In any given scenario, these freedoms must apply to whatever code we plan to make use of, or lead others to make use of. For instance, consider a program A which automatically launches a program B to handle some cases. If we plan to distribute A as it stands, that implies users will need B, so we need to judge whether both A and B are free. However, if we plan to modify A so that it doesn't use B, only A needs to be free; B is not pertinent to that plan.

A general goal of GNU organization is that its GNU system can be used for commercial use, so being developed by different organizations and included in their own solutions. I think it is also important to remark the freedoms that must be guaranteed for a program to be free. 
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.This distribution can be either “gratis” of charging a fee (but the freedoms must be guaranteed anyway).

Talking now about the different grades of copyleft licences. 

Strong copyleft the derived works must retain the license of the original. A example of this is the GNU General Public License.
Weak copyleft refers to license where not all derived work inherit the copyleft license. Some examples are Mozilla and OpenOffice.org.
Non-copyleft when the work in in public domain such as Apache License version 2.0.

The sources used to write this entry are the following:

  1. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.html
  2. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.htmlreorganization-transparency
  3. https://wiki.itcollege.ee/index.php/E-SPEAIT_T6_Computers_and_Laws_II
  4. https://dbpedia.org/page/Mozilla_Public_License
  5. https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

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