Justification of Free Software and its Enlightenment

Author

Yingkui, Zhang ; Jing, Zhang ; Liye, Wang

Author_Institution

Econ. & Manage., Beijing Univ. of Chem. Technol., Beijing, China

Volume

2

fYear

2010

fDate

19-20 Dec. 2010

Firstpage

171

Lastpage

173

Abstract

Free software is given against the traditional proprietary software. There are huge differences between the free and traditional software in development, dissemination, improvement and their profit model. Restricting the freedom of software may lead to many negative effects, and advocating free software will not result in the lack of human resource, the decrease of efficiency and the reduction of quality in the development of software. In this paper, justification of Free Software and its enlightenment is given in detail. The free software movement reminds us of paying more attention to the aim of intellectual property law, i. e. promoting the public interest. The characteristics of software call upon a further thinking on protecting it by copyright.

Keywords

copyright; public domain software; software quality; copyright protection; free software; public interest; software development; software quality; traditional software; Intellectual property; Law; Licenses; Programming; Psychology; Software; World Wide Web; copyleft; copyright protection; free software; source code;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Software Engineering (WCSE), 2010 Second World Congress on

Conference_Location

Wuhan

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-9287-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WCSE.2010.47

Filename

5718371