... coming soon
The second presentation was about Free software and the difference between free software and proprietary software. Free software does not necessary mean financial freedom it means more freedom to use the software in any way that you would like. this means that you have the freedom to use, copy and distribute the software. the advantages to free software rare that htere is a low cost, you can pick the best and the cheapest, you can decide if and when to upgrade, it is very flexible so that it can tailor to your needs. and no one can take away your ability to use this software
The third presentation was also about free software and it mentioned much of the same information except he added a little trivia: it costs AOL about $.00024/ CD to distribute their Free promotional CD's. He also mentioned the GNU project, which I still don't really understand, and the Free software movement which is working to make proprietary software nonexistent.
It was on Intellectual property.
There are four main types of Intellectual property. They are patents for inventions, trade marks and protection of ideas. With patents, it gives the owner the right, so that means that no one can copy and that the patents are territorial. Trademarks are a badge or trade or origin, they are words, logos, that companies use to distinguish themselves from other companies, and this is how consumers know the companies. Design is the appearances of words or part of product. Copyright is the control the use of materials. It doesn't protect an idea, it also has economical rewards for it efforts and the copyright protection is automatic.
The American Intellectual Property Law Association has 14,000 members. It constitute of lawyers in private and cooperative practice. It was formed in 1897. To get protection you must go through a process. This process is first you have to apply. Which there are no fees and is automatic. Then you have made sure that you don't have already gotten your product out to the public. Otherwise you will not be protected by the IP. When you have the IP, you are able to sell the license to someone else. You can also sell the whole thing to someone else, but if you do this then you have to get their permission in order to use it.
To enforce your rights you can seek out injunctions or damages, bring into a criminal offense, or take out an insurance policy for what you lost. With computer software, you can only patent technical effect. With in just the last month there have been lots of people who have been charged and found guilty of illegal actions like pirating. This is what violates copyright laws. When found guilty they get jail time and big fines.
The second presentation was on Free Software. We filled out a questionnaire. Then, they went through the presentation to answer the questions on the questionnaire. The definition of free software is that is a users freedom to copy, distribute, exchange software. It is a matter of liberty and does not refer to the price. Main difference between free software and proprietary software is that free is 0 or no cost while proprietary is designed to make a profit.
With in Free software there are four main types of freedom. They run from 0to 3. 0 is that you are able to run program for any purpose. 1 is that you can study how it works and adapt to your need. 2 is that it is registry bet. Lastly 3 is the reprogram and give it to others the improvements. The advantages of having free software is that is lower cost, it is the best and the cheapest, runs well on older hardware, it can't control how, when, or edit freedom, it is flexible and tailored to your needs and it is trustworthy.
With free software, there are myths that are running around. Things like it is unsupported, but it has the broadest range of supports. You would think that free software would be less secure but it is really secured. It is a challenge for the source code is longer to break. It also has lots of people who work on them so that the problems get fixed faster. And lastly it is not made up of hackers; it is actually made up of many professionals that work on it.
It also shows that free software is beginning to catch in governments other than the US, and it is the most popular web server on market with Apache. In class we had a discussion on if free software should be used for commercial use why or why not. We agreed on to say that is is already used for commercial use. It is in development and distribution both. It is the freedom to use the program in corporate system or in job.
Presentation 3 was about free software too. We used what we learned off of presentation 2.
He thought that is was the giving out of the free software like AOL does. He called AOL and found out that they spend 356 billion dollars on CD's and letters. In 2002 98 billion was spent on cd'''s. So if you did the math, they spent about .00024 cents on each cd. That is not much at all.
With copy left you can't add restrictions for the freedoms that consumers already have with free software. In 1998 the term open source was used. It is like free software but it is still different enough. It is more business acceptable. This doesn't deal with ethics either. With free software, there is the social problem.
The free software movement goal was to make proprietary software disappear. It was also software for all to use.
It is included in this class because it likely will be a major change on products that we have encountered.