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The ability of organizations to interact towards mutually beneficial goals, and involves the sharing of information and knowledge between these organizations, through the business processes they support, by means of the exchange of data between their ICT systems. It enables a product or system, whose interfaces are completely understood (open standards), to work with other products or systems, present or future, without any restricted access or implementation.
Open standards refer to file formats, protocols and application interfaces that can be implemented by everyone (in open source and proprietary software alike). The process for the standard's development is open and transparent to all interested parties and cannot be controlled by any single person or entity with any vested interests. Some key features of open standards include:
- they are supported by an active community and demonstrate independence or are approved through due process by rough consensus among participants;
- they are platform independent, vendor neutral and usable for multiple implementations; and,
- their specifications and supporting material are freely available restrictions.
Free software is software that respects users' freedom and community. The term “free” is more a matter of liberty than price, as it refers to the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. For most practical purposes it means the same as Open Source Software, although this is widely debated.
Software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.
Open source hardware products are tangible artifacts — machines, devices, or other physical things — whose design has been released to the public in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things.
Intellectual property (or "IP") is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect, and primarily encompasses copyrights, patents, and trademarks. It also includes other types of rights, such as trade secrets, publicity rights, moral rights, and rights against unfair competition.
A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. A typical software license grants the licensee, typically an end-user, permission to use one or more copies of software in ways where such a use would otherwise potentially constitute copyright infringement of the software owner's exclusive rights under copyright law. Two common categories for software under copyright law, are proprietary software and open source software.
Copyright is a form of intellectual property, applicable to certain forms of creative work. Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution.
Copyleft is a copyright licensing scheme in which an author surrenders some, but not all, rights under copyright law. Copyleft allows an author to impose some restrictions on those who want to engage in activities that would usually be reserved by the copyright holder. Under copyleft, derived works may be produced if they are released under the compatible copyleft scheme.
A software product or service that is designed to store and retrieve several versions of source code and related assets in a consistent way, and that can be centralized, decentralized or distributed.