Sunday, December 13, 2009

Week 10-1: The future of software licensing

The task is to predict the future of software licensing landscape in 2015... It is already in 5 years. During last five years the new version of GNU GPL was released and the amount of open-source free software has risen. Proprietary licenses stand for many products and are also widely used, in the meantime also violated. Which changes could be faced and in which direction the licesing will develop?

As the amount of people respecting the idea of free software is growing, the amount of software and products under free licenses will also grow. Even Microsoft has made an effort to step closer to the approach with its Shared Source Initiative, even though it is not so much evaluated by the enthusiasts of open source and free software.

I believe that the majority new comers would go towards open source and free software licensing and try to benefit the project from the collaboration with other programmers. But in five years time the proprietary licenses will not disappear. I guess the stand between those different licenses will change towards more free licensed software emerging but the usage of big proprietary software (like those of MS) will not drop drastically.

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