Legal issues of Open Source Software

From the legal standpoint, Open Source amounts to distributing rights and obligations in software license agreements in such a way, that they would (1) both grant users control over the program and (2) facilitate the sharing of improvements. The Open Source idea aims at reversing the process usually referred to as proprietary licensing and equaling the rights of the users with these of the authors. To some extent, it attempts to destroy monopolies created by copyright laws and to prevent them to arise again. There is much in the discussion on the legal issues of Open Source. The first voices came from the programmers who started the movement.