CHAPTER TWO OPEN SOURCE LICENSING AND COLLABORATION In most parts of the world, software is automatically covered by copyright. This means that other developers require explicit permission to copy, use, modify and redistribute the software. Open source licensing is a way of explicitly granting such permission in a relatively consistent way, allowing developers to share and collaborate efficiently by making common solutions to various problems freely available. This leaves many developers free to spend more time focusing on the problems that are relatively unique to their specific situation. The distribution tools provided with Python are designed to make it reasonably straightforward for developers to make their own contributions back to that common pool of software if they choose to do so. The same distribution tools can also be used to distribute software within an organisation, regardless of whether that software is published as open source software or not. 5