Copycenter: Difference between revisions
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Most copyleft can be considered 'copycenter', in the context of redistribution. |
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{{CquoteTxt|The way it was characterized politically, you had copyright, which is what the big companies use to lock everything up; you had copyleft, which is free software's way of making sure they can't lock it up; and then [[Berkeley Software Distribution|Berkeley]] had what we called ‘copycenter’, which is ‘take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want.’|[[Kirk McKusick]]|[[BSDCon]] 1999}} |
{{CquoteTxt|The way it was characterized politically, you had copyright, which is what the big companies use to lock everything up; you had copyleft, which is free software's way of making sure they can't lock it up; and then [[Berkeley Software Distribution|Berkeley]] had what we called ‘copycenter’, which is ‘take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want.’|[[Kirk McKusick]]|[[BSDCon]] 1999}} |
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The liberty to 'make as many copies as you want' is provided by most copyleft licenses. What makes copycenter an appropriate moniker for the BSD license is that it sits in between the Public Domain (which has no protection against derivative proprietarization, similar to BSD) and Copyright which disallows redistribution and modification without the express consent of the Copyright holder. |
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== See also == |
== See also == |
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{{wiktionary}} |
{{wiktionary}} |
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Revision as of 02:29, 16 January 2008
Copycenter is a term used to explain the nature of the modified BSD license, the free software license used for most of the free software included in various free distributions of the BSD operating system. The term was presented by Kirk McKusick, a computer scientist famous for his work on BSD, during one of his speeches at BSDCon 1999. It is a word play on copyright, copyleft and copy center.
The way it was characterized politically, you had copyright, which is what the big companies use to lock everything up; you had copyleft, which is free software's way of making sure they can't lock it up; and then Berkeley had what we called ‘copycenter’, which is ‘take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want.’
— Kirk McKusick, BSDCon 1999
The liberty to 'make as many copies as you want' is provided by most copyleft licenses. What makes copycenter an appropriate moniker for the BSD license is that it sits in between the Public Domain (which has no protection against derivative proprietarization, similar to BSD) and Copyright which disallows redistribution and modification without the express consent of the Copyright holder.
See also
- BSD license
- Berkeley Software Distribution
- Glossary of legal terms in technology
- Permissive free software licences
References
- The Jargon File contributors (2006). "copycenter". The Jargon File. Eric S. Raymond.
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