Open, free, temporary: software licensing

This is probably the most common type of software. Copyrights belong to a specific person or company; you are not allowed to copy, modify, or distribute the software without their consent. To use it, you must pay for it. The price of the product is strictly defined and may depend on many factors, e.g., target groups: school (EDU), students, companies, home. It can be purchased together with a new computer and assigned solely to it (OEM) – and note here – the license expires when the computer is scrapped, or acquired separately – for a single workstation or a computer network (CORP). It very often turns out that depending on which target group we are assigned to, we can pay, for example, 2000 PLN more for the same product…

Demo – i.e., a free demonstration version – usually stripped of save functions. We can see what the program allows, but we cannot test it thoroughly. Such a very limited version is intended to encourage us to buy the full product.

Similar to a demo, except that we can usually try out fully functional software. However, such a version has limits: time-based (e.g., 40 days), number of program launches (e.g., 20 times), or duration of simultaneous use (e.g., half an hour). After the deadline, the program must be deleted from the disk or the author must be paid for the full version. One of the larger websites containing this type of product for testing is www.tucows.com.

A program available for free, it has no license fees. It can only be used under appropriate, specified rules. It should be noted that these types of products are not necessarily free/libre, they are only free of charge and only in cases specified by the license. The term freeware is very broad and unfortunately, many surprises can be hidden under this concept. One of the types of freeware are, for example, adware or spyware programs, which, under the guise of useful programs, can collect and send data from the computer on their own.

…are usually the source codes and specifications of proprietary file formats used by a given program (closed source software). This creates many problems related to interoperability between products from different companies (a policy of locking the customer into one manufacturer), and unavailable sources are actually a pig in a poke… We do not know what is hidden in the compiled version of the product (there are known cases of using software for other, undocumented purposes).