Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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."
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!
We are forbidden to look at any GPL'ed code. BSD code is a grey area, and we need to consult with legal.
/. if that all truly be the case??
Shouldn't you be fixing some bugs and not browsing
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
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.
/*
* 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!
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.
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