Eli5 what are licenses on operating systems?
In: Technology
As /u/Skatingraccoon says its the thing that allows you permission from the vendor to run the operating system.
However, you may also be thinking about open source licenses like when you open your smartphone’s About/Software screen. In that case, open source software is software that is developed by community members (and sometimes corporations) but is freely available for use by all, with the one condition that if you DO use that software in your not-free software product, you have to disclose its use and provide evidence that either you are using that source code unaltered in your product or you provide your altered/derived source code back to the community.
For example, any “smart” device like a smart media device or a home wifi router that has a webpage where you configure it has a built in webserver. If I were to use the popular open source webserver Apache in my product, I would have to disclose that I am using it. I can’t just use the Apache webserver, slap my branding and logo on it and then charge lots of money for it.
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