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16.4 Thought Experiment: Component Reuse
Commercial law can be used to protect intellectual property through contracts and
licenses. This is the primary mechanism that copyright holders can allow others to
use their IP. Licenses are used to limit what buyers of software can do with the prod-
uct. For instance, when we “purchase” Adobe Illustrator, we purchase a DVD with
the program and license to use the program. We don't actually own Adobe Illustra-
tor. Furthermore, according to the End User License Agreement (EULA), we can
not make more copies of the program and sell it, we can not reverse engineer the
program, and we can not transfer our rights to the software to anyone else [
9
]. Open
source software stands apart from most commercial software by both revealing the
source code and using a license that also requires users to keep the software open to
a greater or lesser extent.
Open source licenses, Christopher Kelty wrote, such as the GNU General Public
License, are “a beautiful, clever, powerful 'hack' of intellectual property law” [
11
].
Where most licenses prevent sharing of intellectual property, the GPL requires that
the intellectual property be kept free. In 1985 Richard Stallman created a Public
License in connection with his free GNU operating system, the GNU Public License
(GPL).
During the early years of the GPL, Stallman created the Free Software Foun-
dation, an organization with the stated goal of working towards free software de-
velopment. Stallman believed that software should not be the subject of copyright
and that people who enforce copyrights harm society. He structured the license to
pass along to any derivative work to better facilitate free use of the code [
6
]. Let
us take a close look at how this would work. Let us assume that the GNU Public
License mentioned above included a provision that stated, “If you use this code you
agree to the license. You may copy, modify and redistribute the code under this li-
cense freely. But, if you do, you must license your product under the same terms as
the GNU Public License.” The license is essentially reciprocal, self-replicating, and
forces any product created from the licensed work to be offered free as well. This
mechanism helped the GPL spread far and wide, but it was also the shared belief
in the open source community that code should be shared for free which made the
GPL so popular. A well-known example is the adoption of GPL by Linus Torvalds
for the Linux operating system. This license is now one of the more prolific pub-
lic licenses in the programming community. Approximately two-thirds of projects
submitted through the SourceForge and Freshmeat libraries use this license.
Licenses for copyrighted works can be useful tools to help balance the competing
interests of commercial and public use. Each author gets to choose whether or not to
offer his work under a license. Without the license, any work created from the orig-
inal author's code may be an infringement of a copyright or patent. With a license,
so long as the programmer abides by its terms, he or she may use the code without
infringing. While these various licenses can be effective patches for copyright or
patent law in certain circumstances, they have limitations.
We use the following scenario to examine the role of licenses when reusing com-
ponents in software development.
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