Licenses

Why licences matter

Every piece of software arrives with terms — explicit or assumed — that determine who holds authority over it and what everyone else is permitted to do. Those terms, taken together, fall into three categories that are not merely technical distinctions but different settlements between the people who make software and the people who depend on it.

Closed (proprietary) software: The source code is withheld. The logic of the system — what it does, what it records, what it transmits — is known only to its makers. You may use it under conditions they set, for as long as they permit, at a price they determine. If those conditions change, or the product is discontinued, or the company is acquired, you have no recourse other than compliance or departure. The operational knowledge you have built around the system is, in effect, hostage to their continued goodwill. Most of the business tools that carry familiar names — Microsoft Office, Salesforce, Shopify — are held on exactly these terms.
Open source software: The source code is visible, which is not without value — security researchers can examine it, developers can learn from it. But visibility is not the same as freedom. A project can be open source while remaining under the effective control of a single corporation, which retains the authority to change direction, alter licensing, or close the commons whenever it becomes commercially convenient. The term has been adopted by marketing with sufficient enthusiasm that it no longer reliably signals anything about governance or user rights.
Libre (free/freedom) software: The distinction here is not of degree but of kind. Libre software — the word taken from the Spanish and French for freedom, to avoid the ambiguity of the English "free" — guarantees four specific rights: to use the software for any purpose, to study how it works, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions. These rights are not granted conditionally or revocably. They are embedded in the licence and hold regardless of who owns the company that originally wrote the code. No single entity controls libre software. Those rights, once granted, cannot be withdrawn. The licences and organisations that protect these rights are examined in more detail elsewhere →

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