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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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personal license, or multiple users with an enterprise license.

Today, the picture is muddier. You can buy the use of Microsoft Office,

for example, as long as you pay a monthly or yearly fee. The personal license

enables you to share the software with several other people or accounts and

use it on several of your personal machines.

The End User License Agreement (EULA) you agree to abide by when you

open or install new software obligates you to abide by the use and sharing

guidelines stipulated by the software copyright holder. You agree to the

EULA for Microsoft Office, in other words, and you don’t try to make illegal

copies or share beyond what Microsoft says is okay.

Various forms of digital rights management (DRM) enforce how you use

commercial software. Many programs require activation over the Internet, for

example, or a special account with the copyright holder. To use Adobe

software, such as Photoshop, you need an account with Adobe.com.

Non-Commercial Licensing

For moral or philosophical reasons, some developers want their software to

be free for some or all purposes. When Linus Torvalds created the Linux

operating system, for example, he made it freely available for people. GIMP

image-editing software likewise is available to download and use for free.

Non-commercial licensing has variations. Many non-commercial

programs are only “free” for personal use. If you want to use the excellent

TeamViewer remote access program at your office, for example, you need to

buy a commercial license. But if you want to log in to your home machine

from your personal laptop, you can use TeamViewer for free.

Open Source Versus Closed Source

Another huge variation in software use and licensing is what you can do with

the source code of an application. Open source software licenses generally

allow you to take the original code and modify it. Some open source licenses

require you to make the modified code available for free download; others

don’t require that at all. Closed source software licenses stipulate that you

can’t modify the source code or make it part of some other software suite.

Although CompTIA A+ 1002 exam objectives list open source vs.

commercial license, that distinction does not exist in the real world. There are

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