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India Cool to Microsoft Source Code Offer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the look-at-the-strings-on-that-thing dept.

indianseason writes "Economic Times, India reports on the failure of Microsoft to sign up the Indian government as part of the Government Security Program. The Print Edition carries a comment by an official: "... there was tremendous pressure on us to sign an MoU (memorandum of understanding) which would allow Microsoft access to all TDIL products (Technology Development for Indian Languages)." The government has gone ahead and put all the project initiatives in the public domain. TDIL recently released Indix : an engine for rendering Indian languages on linux."

7 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So what's the problem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Since when is Public Domain = GPL?

  2. Re:Windows source code, huh? by flend · · Score: 2, Informative

    To be frank, the old real way they can know that the source code they have is actually running on their machine in unadulterated form, is to compile the source and then use this version on all of their machines.

    Whilst I guess a government could insist on this, reinstalling all machines after they'd be bought, presumably with Windows pre-installed, from the supplier, it would still be an undertaking.

  3. "Cool" in what sense? by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Cool" as in "agreeable to"?

    Or "cool" as in "less interested?"

    Yeah, RTFA. But what a lousy headline.

  4. Re:Windows source code, huh? by killmenow · · Score: 2, Informative

    I am in a relatively small organization. We re-image every PC we buy with a standard image of Windows 2000 Pro. Large organizations do this *all the time*.

    The undertaking is defining and maintaining the image. Re-imaging new PCs is trivial.

  5. Re:Indix? by rocketfairy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Pango is still pretty ugly in Devanagri (the Hindi script); Indix seems a little better at displaying conjoined letters, which are a big pain. I'm not sure of the status, but Pango was working on complex text layout, so the framework should eventually be better at laying out Devanagri.

  6. Re:Windows source code, huh? by ojQj · · Score: 3, Informative
    This would only do it if you could also be sure your compiler doesn't have a backdoor of its own. Since I doubt their code builds anywhere other than in Visual Studio, even building the code yourself doesn't give you any guarantees.

    Disclaimer: Although clever, the idea of using a compiler to insure security holes isn't my own...

  7. Re:Which Way? by iabervon · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Indian government would like to foster the growth of local computer companies with minimal employment requirements. They'd like it to be possible for an Indian company to be able to hire programmers who don't know any foriegn languages, which means that the computers have to support Indian languages conveniently. The people who produce the necessary software commercially, however, are likely to be competitors of such companies, and thus have no incentive to add this functionality. That's why the Indian govenrment had to produce it in the first place. At this point, they want to minimize the barriers to inclusion, so a BSD license is most suitable. The situation is much like that for Vorbis libraries, where even RMS has said that the BSD license is preferrable, since it helps to promote the free standard, which is more important than keeping the implementation free when embedded.