June 26, 1800-2100

1. Housekeeping:
1. Labs will be only on Fridays. The Monday and Wenesday meetings will b ein the lecture theatre
2. There will be a quiz on Monday July 3rd. It will be a written quiz. It will have two questions covering topics covered during the 1st two weeks of this class.
2. Review of meeting from week one including labs

1. The Economic model of Open Source
2. Copyrights, Patents and Trademarks
1. RAND - Reasonable And Non Discriminatory
3. Licensing models:
1. What is the GPL?
2. The 4 levels of freedom
3. Creative Commons

Presentation Slides

July 4th 2006:

I received the following question and here is my answer:

> 1) What does the integrity of the Author's Source Code mean? Does it

> mean that the original author can prohibit another person (who

> modified the source code) to distribute the modified version? Or when

> a person distribute the modified software, he/she must attached the

> original source code together with the distribution?

The idea behind this is to ensure that the original author's code is

made available in the original format to anyone who needs it because

it could be that those who took the code from the 1st author could have

done changes etc to which the 1st author is not entirely aware of.

Hence, if a user uses the modified code and finds an issue with it

and approachs the 1st author for help, for example, the 1st author

would want to know if the user is using his original code or something

modified. In general, the 1st author might not be aware of the changes

and improvements done to his code in all circumstances. Hence the

need to preserve the integrity of the original author's code.

It is like saying that you bought a new car and then you went to modify

it. After the modification, you sold it to a 3rd person. Now that 3rd

person has some issue with the car and goes back to the manufacturer of

the car. Will the manufacturer agree to fix the issue? In most cases

you cannot because the "integrity of the car" is not there anymore. In

the case of software, that is less of an issue because you can always

get the code of the orginal author.

> 2) Can u explain in more layman terms for the following phases:

> "License must not be Specific to a Product" & "License must be

> technology-neutral"?

> I'm really sorry that I dun understand the explanations written in the

> presentation slides.

An easy example is something like this. If you bought an audio cd,

are you restricted from playing that audio cd on only Sony CD players?

If that is the case, they the license that the audio cd came in is specific

to a product and not technology neutral. This is what we see in music

that has digital rights/restrictons management. In the example I gave

about DVDs, if you were to buy a DVD from, say, the US, you can play

that on DVD players that allow region 1 only. So, if you had a region

3 DVD player (as what it would be in SIngapore), then you cannot play

that DVD. Another example is how some websites need Internet

Explorer to be the browser for the site to work well. Why should that

be the case? By making that restriction, you have a license to use

the contents of that site now not technology neutral and specific to a

product (IE in this case).

Australia vs Italy at 11pm

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