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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 number of open-source licenses has exploded, leaving many in the community miffed.
Why don't they just pick one? How does entering another license into the fray solve the problem with there being too many?
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
What need is it, exactly, that india requires that isn't met by the GNU or BSD licenses?
What's next? AmericanNationalLicense? BritishNationalLicense?
This can only be a bad thing.
Licenses like the LGPL are confusing and cause programmers to fail to live up to their obligations.
For example, most programmers who use LGPL libraries don't realize their binaries become subject to LGPL even if their source code does not if they simply link to LGPL libraries by using header files:
LGPL Section 5 Paragraph 3:
'When a "work that uses the Library" uses material from a header file that is part of the Library, the object code for the work may be a derivative work of the Library even though the source code is not. Whether this is true is especially significant if the work can be linked without the Library, or if the work is itself a library. The threshold for this to be true is not precisely defined by law.'
And they don't realize that distributing such works with non-LGPL terms means that the works are covered by both non-LGPL terms as well as relevant LGPL conditions for non-LGPL distribution scenarios:
LGPL Section 6 Paragraph 1:
'[...] and distribute that work under terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit [...]'
Every programmer or company using LGPL libraries in their products need to understand this and start living up to their obligations. And yes, that includes commercial vendors that link to LGPL c runtime libraries in Linux.
The number of open-source licenses has exploded, leaving many in the community miffed
Is there an "Open Source license-picking wizard" anywhere?
Remember the old mainframe(?) "animals" game in which you pick an animal, and it would keep asking you questions to differentiate between two types, until it guessed your animal, or didn't have your animal in it's list? (actually it was a binary tree)
We could use one of those. It keeps asking us questions, one at a time, until there is only one license that matches our selections. Any new license can be added to the tree at any time by creating a question that differentiates it from the license you would otherwise get by answering the questions for it.
- bp
bp
Actually in a way, I rather envy these up and coming third world states as they begin to make their presence felt. They have few advantages in the global economy, but its like the Russians; they had the best mathemeticians in the world because all you needed to learn it was a pen and paper. Well all you need to learn software, graphic design, or any of the many related fields is a computer, and they are getting cheaper by the week.
These countries have a chance to learn from the mistakes made by the western world (in particular America and its crippling IP laws), so I wouldn't call it a process of catching up, more a process of cherry picking the best ideas and choosing their own divergent path.
I expect the next large IT advances to come from places like India - once it becomes obvious to them that they have a clear run at parity, with much more advanced nations, they will invest many more of their resources into it. In fact, unhindered by IP law, they may well become vastly superior in terms of IT.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Here, literally, Phatak means "Gate", typically attached to fence. Deepak means "Lamp". Given these, it could be your gateway to illumination.
Its obviously a stupid idea to create another license just so contributors can keep their modifications. They already can do that! And it doesn't matter that India has 250,000 students (of which how many are writing any open source code that matters?), because if the students understand open source, and if the teachers do, they can still and probably will still release their software under GPL or BSD.
Thats the beautiful thing about open source, just as the community must maintain code for the code to thrive, the community must maintain the license as well. So just because some blowhard gets it in their head that no existing license could address their specific problem, and thus they need to create a new one, the community doesn't have to use their license. Thats even if OSI decides to certify it.
This is why I love open source so much. The community will solve this issue, it will weed these losers out. No congressional act needed, no changing of the rules, it didn't even take me wasting 15 minutes of work time to type it up. This is how it should be done.
Matter of fact, the more I think about this story, the less it matters. I'm going back to work.
http://www.haxwell.org
GPL is the hobby and leisure of rich people who can afford to be charitable - after all RMS gets paid more for 1 talk than 1 Indian programmer makes all year and needs to feed a family of 4/6. RMS can get a roof over his head anyday even if he doesn't make money. Poor old Rajeev from Bombay stands in the rain if he's not paid for his programming skills (India doesn't have any safety nets for unemployed people).
Going BSD gives India a way to get a leg up on Western programmers. India doesn't have to share its IP with China or any other up and coming offshore programming outfit and shit that's the ONLY thing India got going.
None of them seem to have a clue that a world exists outside of their campuses, and that world if full of greedy capitalists.
The beauty of the GPL as opposed to BSD or MIT schemes is that it uses existing copyright laws to ensure that programmers can actually be recognized properly for the code they create.
This means a lot more than having the respect of your peers. It means being able to feed your family.
Of course, GPL won't enable you to make money in and of itself, but it prevents others from directly exploiting you. You hear a lot of whining about loss of freedom in today's world, but I will truely be frightened the day a GPL case is lost in a Supreme Court somewhere. It's that important.
Open Source ideas outside of the GPL are not practical if you lack the massive finacial support of an institution. They do have their place though, I guess.
In this thread, CNet is spinning the topic to focus on the open source movement, not the free software movement. There are differences between the movements and, while members of them work together in practical projects, the two movements are quite different philosophically. One of those differences has to do with discussing freedoms at all (the open source movement was designed not to discuss freedom, but the free software movement focuses on it) and another difference in practice concerns the preservation of freedoms in derivative works (the open source movement makes no difference between what the free software movement calls "copylefted" and "non-copylefted" licenses).
Please do cite where you would get this misinformation, because it has never been true and for a very good reason: "choice" is a way to railroad someone into losing their freedom. The free software movement is about giving all computer users the freedom to share and modify computer software. Choice is an argument that might appear to tend toward that end, but is actually quite different.
Some time ago, three graphical web browsers were the most popular web browsers around: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Opera. Since there are at least two browsers in the set, choice is satisified. But software freedom is not satisfied at all because all of those browsers are proprietary software; none of these programs give you all of the freedoms of free software.
Today, Firefox is increasingly popular, but it is being pitched by the Mozilla Foundation on this weaker argument of "choice". Software freedom is a better argument which goes unmentioned by the Mozilla Foundation because they choose to follow the open source movement. The advantage to them is that if they ever want to make Firefox into a non-free browser, they can do so without altering their argument on why one should choose Firefox. Free software advocates, however, would lose interest in Firefox if it became non-free.
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