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India Cool to Microsoft Source Code Offer
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."
They can still access all the technology ...
The Indian government really managed to get the problem with microsofts shared source initiative. The only thing it does is create a constituency in a government or organization to promote microsoft products. It allows microsoft to get a bunch of your influential people, sign binding agreements with microsoft, and then get the potemkin village treatment of microsofts source.
Nearly ten years have gone by with Security being a high priority at microsoft, look at the results.
According to recent talk of Richard M. Stallman at CERN, governments do not get Windows source code as such, but rather a means to look at it on Microsoft site.
There is not way to determine whether what they are looking at is what really running on their computers, thus defeating the whole point of having that access anyway
It will be interesting to see how the Indian government goes on this one.
TDIL has value in making computers more accessible to much of their population. For some, this is a money-making opportunity to charge for access to the technology that will be deployed to a billion potential customers. For others, this is an opportunity to speed up introduction of technology to the country. It could be both.
They could go with something like a GPL on TDIL that MS would detest, but would enable free software development in India, which later could be used as a platform by commercial firms in India for specific applications. But the government would not reap any immediate financial gain from this; only the long term gains from an increased tax base of a larger, faster growing economy in general.
They could go with selling out to MS entirely, which would give the government more money in the short term, but would impede internal software development because it would necessitate all the Indian software developers acquiring MS specific tools to do their jobs and to compete with MS. Deployment of IT in the country would be less because it would be limited to those who could afford it.
Possibly going with a BSD license would provide the biggest initial boost in software development in India, but the long term benefits are less clear.
Personally, I'd welcome the many intelligent Indian programmers to the world of FOSS. Their contributions would help to make for improved quality and continued low cost for free software. Indigenous businesses in India would be in a better position to take more advantage of information technology and its productivity gains if there was both free software and many local programmers available for customizing it for business needs.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
"I am sure this is a first. The President of India has urged Indian IT Professionals to develop and specialise in OSS rather than Windows. To be noted is that he made the speech (look for the "Think Different" section) at the famous Indian Institute of Information Technology (India's foremost academic institution equivalent to MIT). Also he reminisces that his meeting with Mr.Gates were difficult due to differing views concerning OSS and Security. What should be noted about him is that he is not a politician, but a scientist and an independent thinker foremost."
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This software is copyright (C) 2000-2001, NCST
That ain't public domain. There's more, of course:
All Rights Reserved except as specified below. Permission is hereby granted to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software (or portions thereof) for any purpose, without fee, subject to these conditions:
(1) If any part of the source code for this software is distributed, then this README file must be included, with this copyright and no-warranty notice unaltered; and any additions, deletions, or changes to the original files must be clearly indicated in accompanying documentation.
(2) If only executable code is distributed, then the accompanying documentation must state that "this software is based in part on the work of the IndiX system".
(3) Permission for use of this software is granted only if the user accepts full responsibility for any undesirable consequences; the authors accept NO LIABILITY for damages of any kind.
These conditions apply to any software derived from or based on the IndiX code, not just to the unmodified library. If you use our work, you ought to acknowledge us.
That looks an awful lot like a BSD license...and is obviously not GPL!
For starters, while the Redmond Giant had entered into similar trust-building agreements with global industrial houses, there was not a single Indian company on the list. "If you believe India is a software leader, why not gain industry confidence first?" is the query by policy-makers.
.NET!
The real story is that the Indian gov't wants their software development industry to be included in the deals that Microsoft makes with "the big boys." I suspect we'll see a flurry of activity with Indian sofware companies all of a sudden in the forefront of development initiatives and lookit! They use
The monopoly will win every time. That's why we made laws to outlaw monopolies, see?
Win2k had support for exactly two Indic scripts, Devanagari and Tamil. WinXP has support for four more, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati and Gurmukhi. Till date, MS does not have support for Malayalam, Oriya, Bengali, Sinhala, Burmese or other Indic (that's 'South Asian', not just 'Indian', or 'Devanagari-based') languages.
And even in that, it's pretty shoddy; as anyone who's typed in Telugu/Kannada in MS Office will tell you, there's a mysterious space that gets added after the end of each word. Telugu/Kannada characters mysteriously change into boxes every now and then. Again, mysteriously, {Telugu, Kannada} characters change into boxes when placed along with {Tamil, Devanagari} characters on MSN. That's only TWO of the bugs I've sighted so far; trust me, there are many more.
Your company knows about it and all others; I reported it by email to one of your personnel. Understandably, it's not one of your priorities; obviously, you have other, bigger markets to garner. Which, of course, is precisely the point here; if the source is open, concerned techie Indians can easily look into it and implement according to their needs and schedules, and would not be dependent on some faceless corporation's benevolence.
While I'm not sure it was Indix that I saw in action, but I'll say this:- I've seen Kannada and Devnagari in Emacs, and it's a much much MUCH better rendering than what WinXP offers.
And oh, before I end, you still use the Inscript keyboard layout and complex rendering algos in your Indic implementations, don't you? Guess who developed that, hmmm.
More than mere navel gazing.