Open and closed licenses are two ends of the licensing spectrum. Open licenses are intended to incite innovation by a community, fair use, and accessibility. Alternatively, closed licenses are intended to protect an intellectual property often to generate revenue and protect the identity of the product. In this investigation I use the GNU General Public License against Microsoft Excel 2013’s license. This investigation will compare and contrast differences between the two types of licenses in order to distinguish between open and closed licenses.
1. Who Can Use The Program
Microsoft licenses their software to individual buyers. This is used so that the Microsoft can maintain all rights to their software not explicitly stated in their license. This includes but isn’t limited to publishing, renting, leasing, or lending the software. The standard Microsoft Excel 2013 license purchase is solely intended for the purchaser. Even in the case of virtualization, each account is considered a separate computer. “To create one or more virtual computers on a single computer hardware system, each virtual computer, and the physical computer, is considered a separate computer for purposes of this agreement.” (A3)
In stark contrast, the GNU GPL gives access to anyone for personal use or distribution. This is unrestricted and even includes the sale of derivative works, executable, and source code. However, purchasers or users must be able to access the source code at no extra cost.
2. Warranty
Microsoft provides a limited retail warranty for it’s products which lasts one year from purchase and covers all issues that occur under proper instruction and normal use. This warranty gives the user support for the program in case of error.
The GNU GPL license provides no warranty whatsoever which means if the program encounters an error that impedes the users ability, there is no obligation from the creator to provide support of any kind.
3. Editing and Modifying
The editing of works under the Microsoft license is prohibited and source code is not accessible. This fully eliminated the ability to edit or modify unless the program is reverse engineered, which would be illegal under this license.
Under the GPL license, programs for personal use can be modified, altered, or added to. However, the programs can’t be redistributed without clearly marking the alteration in order to differentiate from the authors of previous versions.
