Sage-Tips

When you purchase proprietary software What does a software license allow you to do?

A typical software license grants the licensee, typically an end-user, permission to use one or more copies of software in ways where such a use would otherwise potentially constitute copyright infringement of the software owner’s exclusive rights under copyright.

When you download a copy of licensed software that is known as?

Answer: Public domain. This is the most permissive type of software license. …

What software can be purchased from a vendor from a company or a consultant and gives you the right to use the software but is not yours to own?

Proprietary, or commercial, software is purchased from a vendor. Such software may be produced by a company that commercially markets software (usually referred to as a software house), by a company that produces its own in-house software, or by a consultant (or consultant company) hired to produce software.

Can I use GPL v3 to distribute my software?

You may copy, distribute and modify the software as long as you track changes/dates of in source files and keep modifications under GPL. You can distribute your application using a GPL library commercially, but you must also provide the source code. GPL v3 tries to close some loopholes in GPL v2.

Is it legal to distribute GPL programs on non-GPL OS?

We can force such rules in the jungle, but in real life (juridical of country or state) it depends on who, whom, when and what. The legal problem (law) raise when you do an act of distributing GPL program as binary or library on non GPL OS.

Can I use the GNU Affero GPL for a web portal?

Developers who wish to address this might want to use the GNU Affero GPL for programs designed for network server use. If I understand the above correctly, that means that using it internally to produce the data served by the web portal would be OK. If so, how about when I distribute the VM with the software set up?

Can I use GPL code at the DevOps / build layer?

Unless someone in the comments disagrees, I’d like to point out that if you need to use a bit of GPL code at your devops / build layer, you can make that tool a separate application which CAN, potentially, be made open source w/o giving away the product your other-named tool builds. If you use GPL code at runtime, you gotta give out the source.