Open-Source Movement: Yay or Nay?

Before shouting out your opinion, you're probably wondering what in the world the Open-Source movement is. The open source movement is a broad-reaching movement of individuals who support the use of open source licences for some or all software. Open source software is made available for anybody to use or modify, as its source code is made available.

There seems to be a marginal influence from the open-source movement on attitudes toward copyright in general.

There is also an interesting issue in connection with the copyright of interface specifications, which affects the interoperability of open source programs with proprietary ones. In some cases, several companies have been forced to give access to in-depth information on the workings of a program or operating system, to allow developers to extend and integrate the software component in their systems or programs.



This kind of information was usually copyrighted and sold only to registered developers, maintaining a strict control on who and where the information was leaked to the outside (Gonzalez-Barahona, 2000).

People do not like being forced into giving information to other people. Once a person's choice is taken away from them, they tend to get annoyed and who can really blame them.

The situation collides with several court decisions, which have made the information presented in header files (those containing only the names and calling information of the various routines that compose a software system, that is, the interface of the system) not completely copyrightable. That means that it is legal to rewrite a copyrighted header file, part of an interface, to create a compatible version. The rationale is that the header contains only information about the access points to the routines, and provides no information on the inner workings of the software. This allows open source developers to recreate a compatible version of any library or component for which a header file is available (Gonzalez-Barahona, 2000).

This effects copyright law because if anything or certain programs and things are going to be re-writable then what's the point of having the copyright in effect at all? If you can change what you please then open-source is doing away with copyrighting all together. How is that going to work for things like books, movies, and TV? That is part of the debate and I think the attitude from some is that open-source is a great idea and good way to get rid of all the copyright drama. On the other hand people trying to protect their intellectual property and what they created aren't exactly thrilled.

What are your thoughts? Are you for or against the open-source movement?

References:

Gonzalez-Barahona, Jesus M. (2000). Open source and copyright law. Retrieved from http://eu.conecta.it/paper/Open_source_copyright_law.html