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.

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.
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
Show more
Related lectures (6)
Nonlinear Analysis of Structures
Explores nonlinear analysis of structures, including the Newmark Method and modeling strategies.
Programming for Engineer: Introduction
Introduces programming basics, debugging, and structured software implementation using powerful tools.
Show more
Related publications (32)

An interior penalty coupling strategy for isogeometric non-conformal Kirchhoff-Love shell patches

Annalisa Buffa, Pablo Antolin Sanchez, Giuliano Guarino

This work focuses on the coupling of trimmed shell patches using Isogeometric Analysis, based on higher continuity splines that seamlessly meet the C 1 \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackag ...
Springer2024

SecureCells: A Secure Compartmentalized Architecture

Babak Falsafi, Mathias Josef Payer, Yuanlong Li, Florian Hofhammer, Siddharth Gupta, Atri Bhattacharyya, Andrés Sánchez Marín

Modern programs are monolithic, combining code of varied provenance without isolation, all the while running on network-connected devices. A vulnerability in any component may compromise code and data of all other components. Compartmentalization separates ...
2023

Interactive Real-time Structural Modelling - Solids

The aim of this master project is to develop a fast computing method for the analysis of structures with non-linear geometric behavior. The Dynamic Relaxation (DR) method is employed instead of the better known Newton-Raphson iteration process based on Fin ...
2020
Show more
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.
Show more

Graph Chatbot

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.