#Lab 2
1. Read the Article. Open Source software is about users having the ability to run, copy, distribute and improve the software. It actually has nothing to do with price, you can still charge for open source software. The free in this context is more related to liberty. If software abides by those four freedoms it is open source.
2. The most important reason to choose a license is to actually make your software open. If no license is directly defined your code is left as all rights reserved and is not able to be used by anyone else. Also choosing a license allows the creator to define how and in what way their code can be used.
3. If a project doesn't have an explicit license then it is for legal purposes all rights reserved. This means that even if the creator wanted it to be "open source" it legally is not. The lack of a license also makes terms of use unclear, how and in what way you can use the code, which could lead to the code not being useable.
4. I think that a failure to use an open systems model certainly contributed to gopher's downfall. Having a frustrated userbase that wanted to help and not leveraging that knowledge likely drove users away. I think it's a pretty catastrophic mistake to not allow the users to actively contribute to and support a very young piece of technology.
5. For this question I will be looking at the Microsoft .NET core . For that project they chose the MIT license. The idea behind that license is that you can basically use the code for anything as long as you give credit to the original source and maintain the MIT license if you distribute the code. This choice makes sense for the .NET framework as it was created as a utility for applications on the Windows operating system. It benefits Microsoft, the original creator, for others to work on and expand this project. The MIT license allows that by keeping it very open while still encouraging growth by maintaing the license on releases.
6. MIT.
7. For a developer Apache is the best you get credit and provide a lot of freedom. For a company, either LGPL or Apache is the best because it allows them freedom or commercial applications. For the common good GPL is probably the best because it would make all source code available for all applications.
8. We all agreed for the most part with the exception being a little variance on what was best for companies either LGPL or Apache.
9. I don't have a lot of ideas for a project so I plan on asking my group what they want to do. One project I thought of in the past was to create a site that brings a lot of accesible astronomy data into one stable page. There are a lot of open resources to tap but they can be hard to read for the common person. We would use either the LAMP or MEAN Stack.