Slashdot Mirror
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."
The LGPL has been especially created to be used in commercial programs where the source could not be given but a library could be used externally (by using headers and libs files only).
Sort of. The creative commons web site has something along those lines at this link
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
- Phatak is not India. He's a professor in one college in India.
- This is not a massively-funded government project. It's one person trying to design a license agreeement, for God's sake. Anyone can do that without implying a nuclear-weapon-like government strategic program. If a professor in, say, OSU was to design a new license, would Slashdot run a story saying "America designing its own Open Source license"?
- I know Phatak. He's a good teacher, but tends to like thinking up grand visions, and sees himself as some kind of leading light carrying India to leadership and glory in the tech world. Not many people other than him see him that way. No reasonable journalist would report his statements/plans as representing what 'India' is doing.
Er, um, doesn't the GPL already do this??? You don't have the rights to -- say -- close-source the entire code, but you can do whatever you want with your own code.
If, on the other hand, he wants to go with a berkely-style license, then please go with the berkeley style. I'm one of those who believes that we already have enough licenses. I'm wondering if Phatak fully understands the licenses that are already out there?
If what he wants is a "look but don't touch" license (a'la some of MS's 'shared source" initiatives) then I'd be inclined to say "thanks but no thanks".
Perhaps the OSI should require people who want to propose yet another Open Source license to show cause why the new license provides something valuable beyond the already existing set.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
...licensing program that will let programmers share ideas with one another while at the same time allowing them to retain the rights to their own software modifications.
/. minions as to why and how.
<rant>
You mean just like almost every other OSI-certified license? Hey, I wrote this code that is a modification to X. I am licensing under license Y. But guess what! I still own my code. I still hold the copyright. Unless you're working with someone who requires any contributions to their code have copyright assigned back to them, you always retain your rights to do whatever you damn well please with your code. All the license does is give other people the same rights I have with some (more or less) restrictions that I, as owner of the code, don't have to follow.
Like, say, there's this project that is dual-licensed under the GPL gratis and a proprietary/closed-source license for a fee...then I can write this additional module of functionality that tacks onto it. I, as owner of the code, can then decide to keep it to myself and not worry about the GPL (because it only kicks in if I distribute), or I can choose to release my code under the GPL (which does not give the project "principle" the right to include it in the proprietary/closed-source license) OR I can do exactly what the other folks are doing: release my modifications gratis (or for a fee if I want to...not that I'd collect much from anybody because the first person who paid could turn around and release it gratis) under the GPL and license it back to the project principle under the proprietary/closed-source license gratis or for a fee if I so choose.
I have all these options because I retain my rights to the code I write, period.
Now, what it strikes me as this guy wants to make something somewhere between the GPL and BSD licenses. A little less scary to PHBs (see: GPL) and a little less scary to developers who believe in "share and share a like" (see: BSD). I just don't know enough about the myriad of other licenses out there to know if something like that already exists...although I suspect it does.
</rant>
Of course, I'm probably way off base and will be undoubtedly regaled by many of the
Depending upon the way you pronounce it, "phatak" could mean boom or gate.
If pronunciation is "phutaak", meaning is boom,
if pron. is "phaatuck", meaning is gate.
No thats no correct. Bombay was renamed to mumbai around 7 years ago. Mumbai IS NOT the english translation for bombay.
One of the things that many people fail to mention. India is indeed pumping out these vast quantities of highly qualified people. The down side is that even if the industry grows at a massive rate and outsourcing continues there is no way that the world economy can sustain these new people joining the market every month. There is very little written about that aspect of the indian graduates.
D &to=INR&amt=1&t=2y
One of the issues that has increased the speed of out sourcing is that the indian rupee has dropped significantly against the US dollar in recent years. When it starts to rise again the cost of outsourcing and employing people in india will increase that could have both possitive and negative aspects on the sectors in question.
Indian Currency here : http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=US