Legal Issues About Development And Use Of Open Source Software

Today, open source software is widely used in most fields in China. And it is necessary to discuss it on legal issues deeply. The purpose of this paper is to give some advice to the persons or the commercial organizations who are engaging in developing/using the open source software or preparing to do that basing on the research of the IT industry or intellectual law in recent years. In this paper, I will mainly use two kinds of methods to expand my discussion:historical method and method of combining theory and practice. Historical method is mainly used for analysis of open source software generation and development, and expansion of the historical background. Basin on the analysis, this paper may expound the internal spirit of open-source software:open, free, and sharing. To understand the history of open source software is also helpful to understand and grasp the open source software definition, which will be beneficial to handle relevant legal issues correctly. The method of combining theory and practice is mainly used in the last two sections. The relation of the relevant law, especial the Copy right law and the Patent law, and the development, as well as the utility of the open-source software will be the emphasis of the analysis.The article is divided into four sections. As discussing open source software history, the author will put forward the concept of open source software from technical and legal perspective of open source software features in the first part. Software usually has two kinds of forms including source code and object code. And the Technical features of open source software lie in the open of the software source code. The legal characters of open source software are embodied in the rules which must be obeyed in the process of the activities of development or use. It is the legal features that make the open source software different from proprietary software. The second part focuses on analyzing the legal character of the open-source software license. In this section, the author will discuss some legal questions which may be met in the development or use, and explore the solutions to these questions. The last parts of the paper raises some questions about open source software first, and tries to find the solution of these questions from the view of intellectual law. The Copyright law and the Patent law are most important for open source software among all the intellectual laws, so these two laws will be discussed emphatically in this part.At present, China is changing to the innovation-oriented country, and the government is making efforts to strengthen the protection of intellectual property. With the widespread use of open source software, it is becoming urgent to do some more research deeply in the field of intellectual law about open source software. If this paper can do a bit contribution to promote open source software research from pure theory to the practical view, the target of author is achieved.