Finally week 8 has arrived! Week 8 will be a little bit of the same as week 7, several topics on the agenda where free software will be the main issue. Free software is software you don’t have to pay for, almost everything on your computer is based on software. And most of it is software you have to pay for, for example Windows, Microsoft, Internet Explorer, Norman antivirus. Just to mention some of them. This is all software you have to pay for, and this software has something called copyright. A copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to the creator of an original work (Mossoff, 2005). This means that nobody else can use sell or promote this products in their name. Creative Commons is a webpage/ organization that provide a lot of information, pictures and software with no copyright. With proprietary software you always know what you get, there are no surprises you will always get quality. And there is always one organization/ person you can contact to get the information you need. However more and more software becomes more accessible for free and more people using it, thanks to sites like creative commons that makes it all easier to access. Free software usually comes from new inventors that want to marketing themselves. However free software usually not always comes by itself, sometimes if you for example download a free media player, you found out after you downloaded that you suddenly have a new tool bar on your internet or a different homepage. This is some of the catches of using the free software, and sometimes they don’t even work as they supposed to do. I think it is good that they have copyright, one of the main reasons is that you always know who the owner is, can always know who is responsible for the software you download. I prefer legalized software however free software is extremely important to the market. Without the free software the prices would explode and it would be much more difficult to get the software we need.
So whenever you see a symbol like this, be carefull and use a diffrent picture! :)
References
Mossoff, A. (2005). Is Copyright Property. 42 San Diego L. Rev, 26-29.
Have to open to read :)
ReplyDelete