Teamviewer provides a download that is “free for private use”. Suffice to say, pinpointing how CERN’s status should be interpreted in the context of each licence agreement and the extent to which we are really permitted to use so-called “free” licences is a very slippery exercise. Indeed, reading licence agreements requires advanced philosophical thinking: what is research, in fact? An activity that results in literature published in academic journals, an activity carried out by someone with a PhD, an activity that is internal to CERN only (excluding the possibility to collaborate with universities even)? Believe us, we have seen every school of thought. Licence conditions* may stipulate that such a download is only free for personal use, for small teams, for universities or non-profits, or something else – and programming for CERN may or may not fall into these categories. The devil, as usual, lies in the detail, namely licence conditions. But what do they actually mean when they say “free”? Many software providers offer a free download and use scheme to promote their product, attract more users and increase their market share. In fact, lots of software are provided to CERN for free, and not just FOSS. However, while we discussed in the past the risk to the software supply chain of blindly downloading, copy/pasting and incorporating any kind of third-party software, we now need to consider the word “ free” – “free” as in “free beer”, not “free” as in “free speech” – and its limitations. Actually, many researchers, software developers and students embrace the concept of free downloads from the internet. In an open, academic environment, the use of free commercial (“freemium”) and open-source software (“ FOSS”) and tools is not unusual.
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