The gist is that every software comes with a license agreement, and the publisher can choose the conditions under which their software is available by specifying terms of use, modification, and distribution for their software.
Although, as the publisher, there are countless ways to which you can specify how restrictive or open these terms are, most industries usually have "standard" set of terms that most commercial license agreements follow, while a few Open Source Software Licenses are widely adopted. It's really inconvenient to ask end users to understand a non-generally accepted license agreement in most cases.
The history of software licensing mostly goes back to the 70s / 80s, before that time, IBM and mainframes typically gave away most of the software for free as did most computer enthusiasts. Bill Gates was somewhat controversial at the time for arguing software should not be free, in a letter he wrote to the hobbyist computer club (link to wikipedia below).
The topic of software licensing has since become philosophical, where some people think software should be free as in "freedom" and should benefit everyone. From a commercial perspective, some people see OSS as a way to grow adoption of their products. Others think it's important to charge for software in order to continue maintaining it.
Some resources:
- https://opensource.org/licenses -> lets you search by criteria (greeter or fewer "freedoms" granted for different OSS license types.)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists, arguably the letter that started the whole debate around software licensing.
- Documentaries: for the history, I would suggest Revolution OS, and Triumph of the nerds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Nerds
- first court case against a Chinese telco using cracked software was regarding EDA software, in case you're interested in learning how phone home technology came about: https://www.itca.com/news/using-friendly-jurisdictions-to-en...
We wrote a few other blog posts about this topic (about software IP protection) on licensespring.com/blog.