| With the coming of economic globalization and information explosion era, software itself, as a tool used to assist computer to achieve various functions and provide all kinds of information for people, became more and more important. Whereas, commercial software developers kept software program's source code highly confidential, and created monopoly constantly under law protection, which greatly hindered the development of the software industry and seriously damaged the interests of software users. Therefore, Richard·Stallman launched the free software movement, the purpose was to made software users share software freely by disclosure software program's source code. Due to word"free"multiple meanings, people often misunderstand free software as a product which was free of charge, and because of this, commercial software developers fight against free software extremely. In order to make free software acceptable by software developers so that free software could develop preferably, people used the batter name"open source software".However, there was a new question: commercial software developers developed new software based on open source software and kept source code of the new software as traditional commercial software. In order to solve the problem and keep the new software's source code disclose, Richard·Stallman designed Copyleft mechanism with corresponding to Copyright. The mechanism was developed as open source software license, to protect the sustainability of open source software open source.Because of the emergence of open source software license, commercial software developers who were aware of the threat began to challenge the license. They asserted open source software license had no the nature of the contract, and considered the license hadn't been draft and translated into other languages by official, and questioned the effectiveness of the general terms and no warranty term, etc. they hoped through these means to deny the license for the protection of open source software. These questions caused scholars'great concern, there had been individual cases to trial the license'effectiveness. Open source software conformed to the trend, and been with the legitimate form, so all circles in the society had expressed their opposite to commercial software developers. Through theoretical analysis and questionnaire survey analysis, we can understand the license was of contractual nature, and its general terms should have legal force, and no warranty term was unreasonable. OSI (Open Source Initiative), as the defender of open source software, and legislatives should take appropriate measures to avoid open source software license into adverse situations and provide a good platform for the development of open source software. |
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