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India Eyeing Its Own Open Source Licence

Posted by Zonk on from the they're-everywhere! dept.

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."

5 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Is this so obvious to everyone else in the world? by zanderredux · · Score: 4, Interesting
    According to Phatak:

    "Legally, we have to move very carefully because the Americans have a tendency to sue anybody for anything,"

    Is this proof that the US legal risk is actually putting extra burden on US-based institutions (including corporations and universities)????

  2. what about by coolcold · · Score: 2, Interesting

    having a license that are splitted into sections?

    this program follows "free use" and "free distribute" section of abc license

    this way, there can be ONE license and everyone can taylor a license of their needs from sections of the license

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  3. Re:what the? by bcrowell · · Score: 4, Interesting
    First of all, that statement assumes that "too many" lisences is a "problem". I bet that many here would disagree
    It is a problem. It's a problem if it makes it difficult or impossible to share code.

    And second, a new lisence is created to meet requirements that existing lisences do not. That's the only problem that all new lisences solve.
    Except that the article doesn't mention anything that they think is unsuitable about the present BSD-style license. It sounds to me more like a case of "me too."

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  4. Great... by fitten · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Great... all we need is even *more* confusion. It's already hard enough to try to figure out if you're going to get a mob of angry nerds with torches and PDAs storming your doors... it's only going to get worse.

  5. Re:This article has very little to do with India by Sivaraj · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    I completely agree. Besides, in India as is the case elsewhere GPL wound makes sense for most of the open source developers who do not what to see their work hijacked.

    There may be a few specialized cases where GPL, BSD, MIT or IBM's public license do not meet the needs. These projects are going release under a different license like so many other projects and companies have done elsewhere.