What is Software Licensing?

Software licensing describes the legal rights pertaining to the authorized use of digital material. Failure to adhere to software license agreement terms often incurs criminal charges related to licensed intellectual property (IP) and copyrighted material.

Generally purchased software is sold with proprietary licenses, that enables businesses to use the software application legally to firstly have access to all of its uses and secondly to ensure the legalities around using that software are enforced.

Software licensing or you

Control.

Many people prefer open source software because they have more control over that kind of software. They can examine the code to make sure it’s not doing anything they don’t want it to do, and they can change parts of it they don’t like. Users who aren’t programmers also benefit from open source software, because they can use this software for any purpose they wish—not merely the way someone else thinks they should.

Security.

Some people prefer open source software because they consider it more secure and stable than proprietary software. Because anyone can view and modify open source software, someone might spot and correct errors or omissions that a program’s original authors might have missed. And because so many programmers can work on a piece of open source software without asking for permission from original authors, they can fix, update, and upgrade open source software more quickly than they can proprietary software.

Stability.

Many users prefer open source software to proprietary software for important, long-term projects. Because programmers publicly distribute the source code for open source software, users relying on that software for critical tasks can be sure their tools won’t disappear or fall into disrepair if their original creators stop working on them. Additionally, open source software tends to both incorporate and operate according to open standards.

Functioning Components

With any software, things occasionally go wrong. When this happens with open source software, you, or an engineer who owes you a favor, may need to spend time debugging the problem. This entails reading through code, working with an open source community, or your open source support provider, and applying a fix. With closed source, on the other hand, once you determine that the problem lies in your vendor’s code, you’re all done! All you have to do is file a ticket and wait.

No Additional Development

With open source, there’s an expectation that if you fix a bug or make an improvement, you’ll contribute your code back to the community that can help test and maintain it over time. With closed source, you never have to contribute anything to anybody. Of course, that’s because you can’t change the code as you don’t have access to it, but you may create your own workarounds to problems you run into. Sure, you might have to keep working around the same issues version after version, but at least you never have to work with the community to make the solution better for others.

Closed source licensing terms and compliance.

With open source, you have to comply with the license terms specified by the components you’re using. Depending on which open source components you use and how you use them (e.g., distributing to third parties or using only for internal purposes), different license terms may apply (e.g., attributing the open source component in your documentation). Companies make it easy to understand and comply with open source licensing terms, but with closed source, you don’t have to worry about any of this!

Software Licensing

Infraplex offers wide variety of software licenses. From Microsoft 365 to Sage Pay, we can source one or multiple licenses.

Infraplex can package license solutions for your business to make it an one stop service to license all the applications your business requires.