12 - Licenses [Massive Teaching]

From Week 2 Lecture Videos of "Teaching goes massive: new skills required"
by Paul-Olivier Dehaye
See
https://etherpad.mozilla.org/pr8ZtLXODg
and
http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2014/07/09/congrats-to-paul-olivier-dehaye-massiveteaching/

So, if you have some kind of works and

you want to encourage others to reproduce
and reuse it

under your own terms, maybe even modify it,

you should put a permissive
creative commons license on it.

It's not quite the same for a software

because it gets more complex, because of
software can be run,

and that aspect has to be clarified as well.

For this reason, for software, you should
not use Creative Commons licensing.

A clear example where you don't have the
permission

to reproduce and modify the software, is
Microsoft Windows.

Opposite, is the operating system Linux,
which is known as free software.

Don't get confused, the word free here
means liberty, not zero dollars.

You're free to do certain things with that software, like modify what it does,

as long as you give proper attribution to the
original authors

and keep the same licence when you
redistribute the software.

You can't just lock it up later.

One example of a free licence is the GPL,
the new GNU General Public Licence.

The spirit here is really to create an
ecosystem of software,

with everyone contributing on improving it
by resharing their modifications.

Up until a few years ago,
this principle worked well

because you had to share
your improvements

when you distributed your software,
maybe because you wanted to sell it.

The way the software industry evolved, though,

is that more and more
we're using services on the web.

For instance, just to pick an example,
many people use Gmail

and don't have an email client
locally installed.

This means that Google can provide the
service it wants to provide,

but never has to redistribute
the software behind it.

Even though most likely, some of it is
running modified GPL licensed software.

To counter this, a new license was created,
called AGPL.

The requirement here is that
if you're running a web service,

such as a website, using
AGPL licensed software,

you have to make the code available
to the general public

and similarly for
its derivatives..

This is the case for EdX.org which
means that you have access to all the code

produced by the EdX nonprofit, you
can look at it, modify it, and improve it.

For Coursera,
you don't have access to that code.

[CC BY-SA
Paul-Olivier Dehaye]