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

what the?

[hostyle]

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?

Re:what the?

[Vellmont]

(The great thing about lisences is that there are so many to choose from!).


Choosing a license isn't like picking a flavor of ice-cream. Choose the wrong one and you could limit your potential to use others code in your software, limit the ability for others to use your code in there software, limit the usefullness of your software, limit its distribution, etc.

The problem with too many licenses is that the incompatibilites between them become more and more complicated. Who wants to understand the intracies of 15 different sofware licenses whenever you want to use someone elses code?

A license-picking wizard

[Black Perl]

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