India Eyeing Its Own Open Source Licence

Guru Goo writes "Deepak Phatak of the Indian Institute of Technology,Mumbai has begun an effort to create an open-source license that will let programmers share ideas while also letting them retain the rights to their own software modifications.The license will likely function much like the Berkeley Software Distribution or the MIT License programs, he added. The number of open-source licenses has exploded, leaving many in the community miffed. But Phatak's proposal comes with the power of numbers. India's 1,750 colleges with computer science and electrical engineering degrees admit about 250,000 students a year. Combined with the outsourcing boom, that makes India one of the major centers for software development. While the collaboration between academia and industry in india is not as pervasive as in the U.S., it is growing."

Comments

That makes sense

[ninja_assault_kitten]

They already have an Out Sourcing license.

A fair and even price

[Timesprout]

A recent visitor to Phatak's office was Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Craig Mundie. "I told him a competitive price point (for a desktop OS) would be in the single digit dollars," Phatak said.

Would that digit have been 0 by any chance?

It's just like the GPL

[DrXym]

Except it says "sir" and "humbly" a lot more.

Licensing maze

[chiph]

You are in a maze of twisty little licenses, all subtly different.

Chip H.

Re:This article has very little to do with India

[donutello]

Phatak is not India. He's a professor in one college in India.

Knowing Phatak, though, I'm pretty sure he did nothing to dissuade the reporter from thinking he represented the entire country :-)