Ethics and rights

There is more than one approach to creating, licensing, and distributing software. For instance, the free software or the open source community produces software under licensing that makes it free for inspection of its code, modification of its code, and distribution.


While the software released under an open source license (such as General Public License, or GPL for short) can be sold for money, the distribution cannot be restricted in the same way as software with copyright and patent restrictions (used by corporations to require licensing fees).


While some advocates of free software use slogans such as "information wants to be free," hinting that it is easy to copy digital data and that the licenses (enforced through laws) are unnatural restrictions, other creators and users of open source software recognize it to be one model among many for software creation, licensing, and distribution.

And the laws themselves are put into place for the ostensible purpose of increasing creative output, by allowing the creators to control and profit most effectively from their intellectual property.Design and implementation of software varies depending on the complexity of the software. For instance design and creation of Microsoft Word software will take much longer time than designing and developing Microsoft Notepad because of the difference in functionalities in each one.

Software is usually designed and created (coded/written/programmed) in integrated development environments (IDE) like emacs, xemacs, Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse that can simplify the process and compile the program. As noted in different section, software is usually created on top of existing software and the application programming interface (API) that the underlying software provides like GTK+, JavaBeans, Swing etc.
Libraries (APIs) are categorized for different purposes. For instance JavaBeans library is used for designing enterprise applications, Windows Forms library is used for designing graphical user interface (GUI) applications like Microsoft Word and Windows Communication Foundation is used for designing web services. There are also underlying concepts in computer programming like quicksort, hashtable,