Free Essay

General Public License

In: Computers and Technology

Submitted By yoboystz
Words 632
Pages 3
Option One
GNU Introduction
The GNU or General Public License plays a major role today in the way people think of programs. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was who originally written the GNU or simply GPL. The case is, most software’s don’t want you to share or change the program. This means that they are trying to take away freedoms of having the program. What the GNU General Public License is designed to do is the opposite of that because it offers freedom to share and change the software and to make sure it is free for all of its users.
This creation caused it to be the most widely used free software license. The GPL accounted for nearly 65% of the 43,442 free software projects listed on Freshmeat as of August 2007. Some believe that the copyleft provided from the GPL was crucial to Linux’s Success because it gave assurance that the work done by programmers who were involved in the kernel would remain free and benefit the world. After the first version of the GPL, more were made that followed. The first GPL was made in 1989. After that, another version was made with similar licenses but there was concern over problems in the GPLv2 so they made another one in June 2007.
Preamble
The General Public License was designed so that it meant that the people won’t think of a free software as related to its price but more to freedom. What this means is that people can do almost anything to the program including, making copies, giving away copies, selling the program, and either turning the original program into something that is better. What this license includes in its preamble is; each distributer must know that there is no warranty for this free library.
With this license, comes great responsibilities for handling this. One example of this would be if you were tried to sell the program that you copied, you will have to tell them all their terms so they know their rights
The General Public License also referred to as (GNU or GPL is one of the most widely used software license among individual, organizations and companies. The reason behind this is this product guarantees its users the freedom to make changes to the software, study and share the software, and if needed the software may be copied. 3 versions of the GNU have been released. Operating System is the core software of any machine that provides interface between applications and the hardware. Different types of operating systems exist that are available these days, some of them are Open source and some are closed or proprietary standards. Each of them has their own benefits and advantages that are detailed in this paper.

As per the table above that provides a quick comparison between the two types of OS. We will discuss each feature in detail,
Product Cost and Licensing
Open Source OS are usually available free of cost or under minimal license cost while Close source OS are usually costly. In latter, development teams are specially hired for the commercial purpose. Companies develop Closed Source OS by hiring dedicated teams for planning, Research & development, implementation, Testing and QA to develop the product. The objective is to make a marketable product to earn profit. This is what they charge from the end customer. On the other hand Open Source OS are developed mostly by group of individuals for non-profit purpose.
After Sales Product Support
The biggest challenge organizations face in running networks is the support. Closed OS usually have dedicated support teams for customers that can provide assistance in deployment, troubleshooting and optimization of certain features in the Operating system. It is difficult to find dedicated support for Open Source OS.

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