Week 6 - Copyleft

 Copyleft

    Having started out as a simple pun on the word 'copyright', copyleft soon evolved into an entire genre of funky iterations of copyright for technically free software. Nowadays, it is most often seen split into three distinct groups: Strong, weak, and no copyleft. There are some splinters, such as 'very strong copyleft', but those aren't formidable enough categories to stand on their own.

Strong copyleft

    The most restrictive type of copyleft, it places a lot of restrictions on the further development of the software. Most notably of all, not being able to be made proprietary and experiencing heavy struggles when combining it with other software. Probably the best category for someone who is very adamant in the design philosophy of their written code - making sure it does not get used for 'the wrong purposes' or distributed solely with the intent of using another person's code to make profit for oneself. If a programmer is trying to write something that others could use in their own applications, but has a full set of functionality as an individual piece of software/data, then it is likely to be either strong or no copyleft. 

Weak copyleft

    Essentially what it says on the box - simply a weak version of strong copyleft. While it still requires holding on to original license, it serves much better for the purposes of being linked with various other programs or proprietary software. As already mentioned, it is very well suited for libraries. In essence, if a programmer is trying to write something that others could use in their own applications, but has limited or no full functionality on its own, it is very likely to be something with a weak copyleft - snippets of code or functions or tools that are best suited for use in a more larger engine that can make full use of them or improve on them. An example of this would be the WebKit engine, something that is absolutely essential in our concurrent day-to-day life - seeing as it powers most of the common browsers used nowadays, probably one of the few acts of kindness Apple has really done :).  

No copyleft

    No copyleft is truly "writing for the community". Without any derivative licensing limitations, anyone wanting to use snippets or full pieces of this data is free to do so and does not have to hold on to the original license at all. As mentioned before, any snippet eligible for strong copyleft is technically suitable for no copyleft as well, it is merely up to the developer(s) to decide on how generous they want to be. Continuity is solely up to the original developers or anyone who wants to keep working on it, therefore I fail to see how it would be massively compromised, seeing as anyone could pick the project up without any issue and work on it to improve it, modernize it, or simply keep up support for it. 

    This fully legal part of the week really was not all that enjoyable to me, and I apologize for the very mediocre blog post. Hopefully it can be made up later when more interesting topics come to play :).

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