Intellectual Property and Open Source: Copyright, Copyleft, and Other Issues for the User Community

by William A. Zucker

Open source is not a new phenomenon. In the early days, when the computing industry's emphasis was on the sale of hardware, hardware manufacturers gave the software away without even bothering to copyright it. In general, software was not portable among hardware platforms, and the manufacturers were only too willing to have the user community find bugs and suggest improvements. As hardware became less important and software more so, the emphasis changed. Software became the focus of proprietary claims and protection. Ownership was rigorously guarded and lawsuits became commonplace as the software was perceived as the primary driver of the economic engine. Source code was regarded as proprietary, and only object or machine-readable code was to be circulated.

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Intellectual Property and Open Source: Copyright, Copyleft, and Other Issues for the User Community May 2003

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