Open source and proprietary software - Ethical, legal and environmental impacts of digital technology - OCR - GCSE Computer Science Revision - OCR - BBC Bitesize (2024)

FAQs

What is open source software OCR? ›

Open source software

Open source projects are projects where the source code used to create the project is made publicly available. Anyone can legally view, modify and distribute the source code.

Proprietary software is software that is copyrighted, which means it can only be obtained by paying for a licence. Proprietary software has many advantages: The product should be free of bugs. If bugs still exist, updates known as patches.

Open-source software is distributed with its source code, and lets users freely inspect, modify, and enhance it per its licensing agreement, while proprietary software is the copyrighted property of an individual or company that limits its use, distribution, and modification by way of a proprietary license.

Legal & Ethical Issues in Computing

Copyright - The use of other peoples content without permission. Cybersecurity - Protecting against hackings, data breaches and all other cybercrimes. Data protection - Responsible collection, storing and use of personal information.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process that converts an image of text into a machine-readable text format. For example, if you scan a form or a receipt, your computer saves the scan as an image file. You cannot use a text editor to edit, search, or count the words in the image file.

Examples of proprietary software include Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite and Apple's iOS. A Proprietary Software License is purchased when acquiring proprietary software. This grants use of the software, but all rights remain with the software developer.

Open source enables technology agility, typically offering multiple ways to solve problems. Open source helps keep your IT organization from getting blocked because a particular capability isn't available from a vendor. Instead of waiting for the vendor to deliver that capability, you can create it yourself.

What is open source software? ›

Open source software is software developed and maintained through open collaboration. It is made available for anyone to use, examine, alter and redistribute however they like, typically at no cost.

Disadvantages of Proprietary Software

Software is quite costly. The software is rigid in nature. it means that you cannot modify the features according to your needs. The users have no right to share the software.

Digital ethics refers to the moral principles and standards governing the ethical behavior and responsibilities of individuals, organizations, and governments in the digital realm. It involves considerations of fairness, transparency, privacy, security, and technology's impact on individuals and society as a whole.

Heavy Metal Contamination: Computers contain heavy metals including lead, mercury, and cadmium. These heavy metals can leach into the ground when computers are discarded in landfills, contaminating soil and groundwater.

There are many legal and ethical issues with computers that can be exploited by bad people to do bad things. Some of those issues include illegal music and video file downloading, spyware, identity theft, phishing, keystroke logging, packet sniffing and cyberbullying.

OCR stands for "Optical Character Recognition." It is a technology that recognizes text within a digital image. It is commonly used to recognize text in scanned documents and images. OCR software can be used to convert a physical paper document, or an image into an accessible electronic version with text.

Best OCR software: Free alternatives

FreeOCR is software for Windows that allows most scanned PDF's and multi page Tiff images to be outputted either as plain text or as a Microsoft Word document. It can also scan text from other image files. The software is free to use, even for commercial purposes.

Tesseract is a free and open source command line OCR engine that was developed at Hewlett-Packard in the mid 80s, and has been maintained by Google since 2006.