Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Commercial software
Summary
Commercial software, or seldom payware, is a computer software that is produced for sale or that serves commercial purposes. Commercial software can be proprietary software or free and open-source software.
While software creation by programming is a time and labor-intensive process, comparable to the creation of physical goods, the reproduction, duplication and sharing of software as digital goods is in comparison disproportionately easy. No special machines or expensive additional resources are required, unlike almost all physical goods and products. Once the software is created it can be copied in infinite numbers, for almost zero cost, by anyone. This made commercialization of software for the mass market in the beginning of the computing era impossible. Unlike hardware, it was not seen as trade-able and commercialize-able good. Software was plainly shared for free (hacker culture) or distributed bundled with sold hardware, as part of the service to make the hardware usable for the customer.
Due to changes in the computer industry in the 1970s and 1980s, software slowly became a commercial good by itself. In 1969, IBM, under threat of antitrust litigation, led the industry change by starting to charge separately for (mainframe) software and services, and ceasing to supply source code. In 1983 binary software became copyrightable by the Apple vs. Franklin law decision, before only source code was copyrightable. Additionally, the growing availability of millions of computers based on the same microprocessor architecture created for the first time a compatible mass market worth and ready for binary retail software commercialization.
Common business wisdom is that software as digital good can be commercialized to the mass-market most successfully as proprietary good, meaning that the free sharing and copying of the users ("software piracy") can be prevented. Control over this can be achieved by copyright which, along with contract law, software patents, and trade secrets, provides a legal basis for the software's owner, the intellectual property (IP) holder, to establish exclusive rights on distribution and therefore commercialization.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related courses (4)
ChE-459: Process development
Through a project, this course will introduce the critical steps in developing a chemical process in the context of industry decarbonisation, from the lab to industrial scale.
CS-510: Topics in software security
Memory corruption and type safety flaws dominate the threat landscape. We will approach current research
from three dimensions: sanitization (finding flaws through runtime monitors); fuzzing (testing
ME-474: Numerical flow simulation
This course provides practical experience in the numerical simulation of fluid flows. Numerical methods are presented in the framework of the finite volume method. A simple solver is developed with Ma
Related people (6)
Related concepts (14)
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is software that, according to the free and open-source software community, grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modifying it, and—in some cases, as is the case with some patent-encumbered and EULA-bound software—from making use of the software on their own, thereby restricting their freedoms.
Personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or technician. Unlike large, costly minicomputers and mainframes, time-sharing by many people at the same time is not used with personal computers. Primarily in the late 1970s and 1980s, the term home computer was also used.
Reverse engineering
Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accomplishes a task with very little (if any) insight into exactly how it does so. It is essentially the process of opening up or dissecting a system to see how it works, in order to duplicate or enhance it.