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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 ...
Uh, no, actually they can't. MS engineers are specifically prohibited from accessing much open-source software (in specific GPL'ed code), without first obtaining permission from the legal department. This is to avoid "contamination" of their source code base.
Excellent point; and Microsoft should lose no time in calling up a well-trusted third-party security company to show that indeed Microsoft products are secure. Of course, it had better be a trusted company, because they don't want their source code getting out.
Hmm... I wonder if I should send my resume to an industry-leading security company, such as @stake, immediately. I'm into document preparation, not security, but I should be able to learn the language reasonably quickly. ;->
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Pango supposed to be able to render and edit Indian text correctly these days? I'm certain I've seen screenshots if GTK2 apps doing that
Hmm...it would depend. We are forbidden to look at any GPL'ed code. BSD code is a grey area, and we need to consult with legal. If the indic language support is truly in the public domain, then we can certainly look at it.
That said, I have trouble with the base story. We've had full support for all the Indic (Devanagari-based) languages since Windows 2000 and Office 2000 shipped. So I don't see why on Earth we'd need to license the Indian technology.
Isnt that a bit on the illegal side?
"here i sell you a tool, but i get to look at EVERYTHING you do, and profit from it, regardless of its relation to the orginal tool.."
Only a monopoly would even have the balls to demand such a concept.
They need to be closed. Im not for governmental influence, but they have gotten out of hand and need to be terminated as a company.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They have been all over the place picking up all the OSS and coding initives that they can .net, TRON yesterday.
Project mercury was brought under
I wonder what China promised them?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What organization is:
a) smart enough to properly assess the security of the Microsoft code and
b) independent enough to publicly fail them if their code wasn't up to snuff and
c) acceptable to Microsoft?
Without all three, you got nothing.
For those of us whose latin is a bit rusty ;-): "Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts."
Words of warning uttered (in ancient Greek) by Laokoon as a warning to the Trojans when they found the wooden horse. The horse was, of course, the infamous Trojan horse, presented by the Greeks as a gift to the Trojans. The horse was full of Greek soldiers, who crept out of the horse in the night and conquered Troy from within.
Lemon curry???
But this is even worse, since the classic argument is that even with access to the source of the compiler, you can still be trojaned.
In this case, you won't even have source for the compiler, which makes it trivial to trojan.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
/*
* Structure of a directory entry
*/
#define EXT2_NAME_LEN 255
Copright Remy Card, Linus Torvalds
Now that all the MS engineers are gone, I'll continue... :-)
Hmm...it would depend. We are forbidden to look at any GPL'ed code. BSD code is a grey area, and we need to consult with legal. If the indic language support is truly in the public domain, then we can certainly look at it.
Don't you feel that this is a ridiculous rule? Ok - if you read GPL'd code, you are now in the position that anything you write of similar functionality is "at risk" of being contaminated by this knowledge. I have to be careful not to view, say, any code in Postgresql as it might affect any coding decisions I might make in the future (I can feel someone about to post some Postgresql code in reply to this ...). That said, almost every piece of code contains the same ideas - maths, caching strategies, data transport. Coming from a scientific background, being able to build on the vast store of knowledge of those who have gone before me is a natural process. Having to walk the boundaries of copyright law, patents and other legal straight-jackets is a confining and ultimately unproductive method.
Just where would we be today if we could treat source code in the same way we treat mathematics?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Would you go with Microsoft? Probably not.
Consider this from the point of view of the Indian government. They can:
A) Let Microsoft come in with low initial prices, taking over the Indian software market and then exerting absolute control later on, or
B) Assign teams at whichever Indian college has the best research facilities, provide them copies of Linux and the BSDs, and have them roll out a purely Indian Linux and/or BSD that can be used across the board as an Indian National O/S. It could be completely pre-vetted for security holes, OpenBSD style, and it could be engineered to support all Indian languages natively alongside English, instead of having them as add-ons. Also it could be used throughout the entire Indian infrastructure, freeing them from any reliance on foreign concerns. Updates could come from the team that rolled it out in the first place. Couple this with a cheap homegrown computer, of course...
Seriously. If you were in the Indian government, what would YOU do?
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
OK, thanks for your contribution to /. misinformation.
0 008
d e%20in%20Windows
MS has used considerable amounts of BSD code in the past, and still does so, for a recent example(last week) see:
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=2003092709
You can also just do a strings of the ftp command on windows, for more details:
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=BSD%20Co
The original windows TCP/IP stack was lifted directly from BSD too... and I'm sure there are many other examples that we will never know of.
Oh, and there was zlib too, because when a hole was found in zlib MS Office and quite a few other MS products had to be patched:
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-860328.html
They have even publicly said that they think the BSD license is great, obviously as long as others use it and they can take advantage of it, I can't recall MS ever releasing anything under the BSD or any other open source license(no, "shared source" is _not_ open source).
Still, as Theo says, if MS uses BSD/public-domain code it's great, that is the point of the BSD license, to improve the sorry state of the software quality in our world, if MS uses BSD code to make their software suck less, great that is what people that releases code under the BSD license want, to make software suck less, not to push any stupid political agenda.
Best wishes
\\Uriel
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
Aaah, finally something about which I may actually know something.
I speak and write Tamil. Characters are almost never merged in Tamil and at least to me, the script looks totally different from Devanagari scripts. This statement should hold for other South Indian languages such as Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and a Pakistani Dravidian language Brahui (unless it uses a Devanagiri or other imported script).
Perhaps the parent poster meant something else by character-merger which I didn't understand. Obviously there could be similarities due to proximate evolution which could be leveraged.
Anand Rangarajan anand@cise.ufl.edu
> Parks and roads are in pub[l]ic domain.
Depends where you live. In the UK, for example, roads are most certainly not public property; the street is a public right of way, but you do not have the right to stand still in it; that's a criminal offence known as 'obstructing the Queen's highway'.
Public Domain, as a legal term applied to software, means "not copyrighted". GPLed software is copyrighted, and therefore is not in the public domain.