ITPEC IP April 2024 Question 18

Which of the following is an appropriate description concerning OSS (Open Source Software)?

a)Use in industries that require high quality, such as the medical industry, is prohibited.b)Various types of license exist, and the terms of license must be observed when the software is used.c)If the source code is released on the Internet, the software can be called OSS even if redistribution is prohibited.d)The software must not be sold for a fee.

Explanation

Various licences exist, and their terms must be observed — OSS is copyrighted software used under the conditions of its licence.

OSS publishes its source code and lets anyone use, modify and redistribute it, but only on the terms of its licence, and the licences differ. The GPL requires derived works that are distributed to be released under the GPL with their source code; permissive licences such as MIT, BSD and Apache mainly require the copyright notice to be kept. Whoever uses OSS must check which licence applies and follow it.

Answer (b)

Why not others:

•(a) — the Open Source Definition forbids restricting any field of use, and OSS such as Linux runs in medical, financial and other high-reliability systems
•(c) — publishing the source is not enough: free redistribution is one of the conditions of OSS, so software that bans redistribution is not OSS
•(d) — OSS may be sold, and distributors charge for packages, media and support; the "free" in free software means freedom of use, not zero price

Key rule: OSS is not public domain: the authors keep the copyright, and the licence grants the rights to use, modify and redistribute together with the conditions attached to them.

Software · AI-written, may contain errors

Previous Next

Practice this exam

This question comes from an official ITPEC past paper. ITPEC Practice is an independent study tool and is not affiliated with ITPEC. See the official IP past-paper collection or Report an issue.